High-ranking university and a friend’s experience made Md Shariful Alam choose Oulu

Not all of his youthful science experiments ended so smoothly, Alam recollects.

“I remember another new toy car which I also opened to see what’s inside. I took the motor out and then tried to open it to try something, but it didn’t really work out. I got kind of punished for that time,” Alam chuckles.

Growing up in his home town of Pabna in Bangladesh, Alam was always interested in the sciences. He wanted to get into electronics and ended up going to college in the nation’s capital, Dhaka, to get a Bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering. During that time, he developed an interest in biomedical engineering. His Bachelor’s thesis was related to the field, as he worked on bioimpedance frequency analysis from the human body for early stage cancer detection.

Alam wasn’t really considering moving outside of Bangladesh, because during that time in the early 2010’s, electronics was growing fast as a field in the country and it seemed likely he could build a career in his home country. In 2015 though, his friend happened to apply to universities in Finland for programmes in electrical engineering. Alam started to look for things in Finland that would interest him, and he found a programme in the University of Oulu, which seemed like a great fit.

“I had another friend who was starting his studies in Oulu in environmental engineering, so I already had someone to ask about their experiences. I also knew something about Finland, my dad used to have a Nokia phone and I used to play [Finnish company Supercell’s] Clash of Clans quite a bit. I was also fascinated to see that the university ranked very high and had a great reputation,” he says.

In 2016, Alam enrolled in the Biomedical Engineering programme and specialised in signal and image processing.

“The work was about interpreting the signals from an electrocardiogram, or ECG, and making it easier for doctors and medical staff to get more meaningful alarms based on the data. I was very interested in learning the programming languages you need to use to process the signals,” Alam says.

This was Alam’s first time travelling outside of Bangladesh, and the complete change of environment was overwhelming at first.

“I hadn’t lived this far from my family before and it took time to adjust to everything. Even if I knew about Finland, I didn’t know about the darkness and winter! But in Oulu, I found good people in the Bangladeshi community and the international community in general. I’ve always enjoyed cricket, and I found some Pakistani and Indian people, who played in the high school gym across the street from the university,” Alam says.

Alam started playing cricket with his newfound friends and he found that exercise and spending time outside in nature helped him get settled.

“It was really good to build social contacts and be in good shape, it helped physically and emotionally. I explored the entire Oulu with my bike, also in the winter, because I had winter tyres. I fell a couple of times, but nothing too serious,” Alam says with a laugh.

Finns are sometimes thought of as being quiet almost to the point of seeming difficult to approach, but Alam doesn’t subscribe to his view.

“Finns are calm, yes, but when you need help they are quite eager to assist you. I remember arriving in Finland with all my luggage and getting on the train. I didn’t know where to put my big piece of luggage, and this Finnish lady showed me the luggage lockers. She was also kind enough to give me a coin to operate the locker, when she saw that I was digging around my pockets to see if I had change,” Alam says.

During his studies in Oulu, Alam says he shifted from theory-based things to more practical issues and more to working on software. After graduating in 2019, he was employed by GE Healthcare in Helsinki, where he now lives and works. He is working on an intensive-care unit monitoring device and specifically its ECG module, and his role is to automate the ECG algorithm tool. He finds his work interesting and also very rewarding.

“At first, I was fascinated with the technology, but now I can see the human value of the work that we do. I have seen the difference that having reliable tools make in the field.”

After moving to Helsinki from Oulu, he found again a community through sports, football this time. He plays football every Saturday and has started running seriously enough that he is taking part in events. Alam says that he has become very health-conscious in Finland. And while he hadn’t travelled abroad before coming to Finland in 2016, he has now travelled to 20 countries for work and leisure.

Now that Alam has settled in Finland and spent almost 10 years in the country, he can look back at his time in the North. The initial adjustment was challenging, but he found himself enjoying many things in Oulu.

“Give yourself time and trust the process and everything will be fine. Most people who come to Finland find themselves having to adjust to the environment, but it will happen. Think positively, engage in different activities and meet people. Good things will happen when you don’t stay at home,” Alam says.

Text and photography: Janne-Pekka Manninen

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