I am Dalia Yehia, assistant lecturer in clinical pharmacy and pharmacy practice department in the Faculty of pharmacy, Pharos University in Alexandria (PUA). I am a member of summer training committee, and quality committee within Pharos University. Currently, I am a PhD student at the High Institute of Public Health (HIPH), in Alexandria University.
During Fall 2018, I have been accepted in staff exchange program at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), in Kuopio, Finland for three months from September till end of November 2018. I went for staff exchange because it holds an opportunity fot joint research, working with multidisciplinary international team in addition to learning about different teaching methodologies.
In comparison to the situation in Egypt, teaching at UEF is more or less the same. Regardings research, UEF dedicated its staff and fund for multidisciplinary research groups for new innovations and publications.
In general, Finns are shy and quiet. From my experience, they are very welcoming, helpful and hospitable. An International once said:” if you make a Finnish friend, you get a lifetime friend.”
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Usually the regular day starts early with lectures or research work, then they have a midday lunch break, then they resume the work. During lectures, a break of 5-10 minutes was given to students every one hour. During the practical labs in the clinical pharmacokinetics course, students were required to solve certain number of cases along the course term without adhering to time required for the labs. So that, students can spend the time during the lab which was 4-5 hours in solving the cases, and taking breaks.
I have participated at the international day at UEF to encourage international students to participate in exchange programs. The best part was conversations I had about Egypt, history, PUA and even Arabic language.
At the begining of this experience, being away from my comfort zone, and as expected I took some time to get used to using maps, be aware of details of daily life and even reaching home, but based on my previous expeiences and with the help I got from colleagues, roommates, and even people in the street, life become familiar within few days.
Kuopio is a very beautiful city, full of forests and lakes with wonderful natural scenery. I liked it specially the peace and quietness that surround the place.
Life in Kuopio is very simple, people use bicycles a lot, and walking is part of their daily life. The idea of recycling is widespread which is very effective in keeping the city clean beside reducing the waste.
I strongly advice my colleagues to apply for the exchange program in the future to get in touch with different experiences in both research and teaching.
On a professional level, I have learned new techniques in research work at the lab. Concerning teaching, we started to use softwares like ”Dose me” at PUA that I used at UEF to facilitate Pharmacokinetics measurements of drugs which need therapeutic monitoring. In addition to practices related to evaluating students, and involvement of students in peer reviewing each other. Also considering students’ self-evaluation as an important part of the whole evaluation process.
On a personal level, it was a rich experience of independency in a different environment. I got to know myself more and learnt to cope within different environment and dealt with cultural differences while keeping my own values.
I believe that students might have to be involved in similar experiences (might be for shorter or longer period of time) to cooperate with students from other cultures and different backgrounds to increase their self-awareness and to work within multidisciplinary teams as well as to learn independency in searching and to apply systematic approach to understand challenging subjects.
