My Academic Achievements At Aalborg Universitet (AAU) In Aalborg, Denmark Between 2017 and 2020

in #life3 years ago

Good day, everyone, both readership here on HIVE and outside of it reading this blog! For today's first post I decided to briefly talk and showcase my academic achievements at Aalborg Universitet (often abbreviated to AAU) in Aalborg, Denmark and talk a little bit about my tragic story there, from gradually losing all of the members of my first two groups (which I de facto co-led with another great friend of mine) during the 1st semester, due to the fact that they decided to eventually drop out prior to the 2nd semester to the physical illnesses which prevented me from being 100% productive and efficient and therefore forcing me to postpone several examinations and beyond.

To start putting things into perspective, I firstly arrived in Aalborg, Denmark at the age of 20 back in 2017, after graduating from both a theoretical high school and a technical college in my home country. I came there in order to study media technology (officially 'Medialogy') on a period of three years on a BSc (i.e. bachelor of science) level. While I've been there for a total amount of 6 long semesters, from the Autumn of 2017 to the Summer of 2020, I have unfortunately not been able to return to my home country with the final graduation diploma, due to a lot of bad luck related to health, precarious academic supervision and the lack of the right to contest the results of some previous examinations which I am quite certain I had enough proven hands on knowledge to have passed.

All throughout this time, I have developed some strong bonds with both international students (most of them on a master's level or briefly ERASMUS+) with whom I was living in the student flats rented out by the IAO (International Accommodation Office), the official administrative and logistic body of this Danish public institution of higher education. From all of my former flatmates, I got along most well with those from Germany and Italy, with the latter Italian flatmate helping me tremendously when I suffered from kidney stones back in 2018 (for which I am deeply grateful for an entire lifetime!).

Long story short, in order not to expand further on my personal mishaps and grievances of the past, I had both ups and downs while I was living in Aalborg, Denmark. I met many good-natured people there, but I did have the bad luck of meeting and knowing the negative side of almost a same amount of people with whom now, retrospectively thinking on the past, I wouldn't wish I would have interacted... but that's life, sometimes one does not have much of a choice and has to do what is pre-destined I presume.

Either way, you have my word that I played by the rules, both within the university and outside of it and that I returned there with my best intentions of finishing my studies. On the way however, due primarily to the rise of the dreadful COVID-19 pandemic, which instilled fear in many of us, I had to pull back and return to my home country where I hadn't given up on finishing my higher education as I started it all over from 1st year studying digital media at the local university in my hometown Suceava, in northeastern Romania.

I know for certain I lost some friends there and that, perhaps, I won't be coming back there, but I have to be balanced and acknowledge there were both good times and bad times. Most of the good times were outside of university, when I attended live concerts by some of my most favourite artists, more specifically Bobby McFerrin, Jethro Tull, or Katie Melua. If I wouldn't have had a lingering chronic gastritis for 8 months, I would have also been able to attend a Roger Hodgson (the frontman of progressive rock Supertramp) concert in 2019, but I wasn't able to commute from Aalborg to Randers where the concert was actually held.

Anyway, sticking back to the point of this article, I wanted to share my hard worked diplomas after passing some of the hardest courses in my entire student life up to this current point. That being said, without further ado, a detailed gallery depicting my results at AAU can be seen down below:

P0 - Creative Play - Applied Technology.jpeg
P0 - Creative Play: Applied Technology, my first passed group project during the 1st semester spent in Aalborg at Aalborg Universitet (AAU), worth 5 ECTS points

P1 - Designing From Both Sides Of The Screen.jpeg
P1 - Designing From Both Sides Of The Screen, my second overall group project at AAU

P2 - Human-Computer Interaction.jpeg
P2 - Human-Computer Interaction, my third overall group project at AAU

P3 - Visual Computing-Human Perception.jpeg
P3 - Visual Computing-Human Perception, my fourth overall group project at AAU

P4 - Sound Computing And Sensor Technology.jpeg
P4 - Sound Computing And Sensor Technology, my fifth overall group project at AAU

P5 - Audio-Visual Experiments.jpeg
P5 - Audio-Visual Experiments, my sixth overall group project at AAU

Problem Based Learning (PBL).jpeg
Problem Based Learning, PBL, my first passed individual course

Introduction To Programming (GPRO).jpeg
Introduction To Programming, a Processing-based course

Audio-Visual Sketching (AVS).jpeg
Audio-Visual Sketching, a Maya-based course

Design And Analysis Of Experiments (DAE).jpeg
Design And Analysis Of Experiments, my first passed statistics exam

Programming For Interaction (PI).jpeg
Programming For Interaction, a C/C++ course

Image Processing (IP).jpeg
Image Processing, a Python-based course on image processing

Human Senses And Perception (HSP).jpeg
Human Senses And Perception, an anatomy-based course with focus on the human senses' relationship with digital technology and its products

Interaction Design (IT).jpeg
Interactive Design, a design course on interactive interfaces

As you can clearly see from up above, all of them were graded on the 7-step Danish academic grading scale, colloquially dubbed the 12 step scale. With respect to some of the previous results enlisted above, I truly feel I deserved more on behalf of my previous examiners, but... that was what they decided and what ultimately stands on these diplomas.

To conclude this article, I wasn't one of the whiners and quitters up until things were hardly bearable anymore for me, more specifically on the verge of the 6th semester. I came back in 2018 and 2019 to Aalborg hoping things might change for the better there for me, but it turned out I was in a for a huge disappointment and trickery as well I might add.

Nevertheless, all these three years are part of my life experience, with the good and the bad akin, and have also marked my coming of age abroad from teenage to young adulthood. My advice to all young men out there still pursuing higher education is not to give up, no matter what. You can change the institution if you don't like it and you feel like you were poorly or unjustly treated, but don't lose hope or despair. There is always a rainbow at the end of each huge storm. :)