Hi! My name is Mira, I am an Erasmus Mundus master’s student in the Engineering of Data-intensive Intelligent Software Systems (EDISS) program. The studies in this program are focused on connecting Software Engineering and Data Science, where we enhance our skills in both of these fields, including Machine Learning. The first year of the program is held in Turku, Finland, and the second one consists of several specializations that we can choose from: Industrial Machine Learning (Västerås, Sweden), Computer Vision and Intelligent Systems (Palma de Mallorca, Spain), Model Driven Machine Learning (L’aquila, Italy). I am studying my second year in Spain.

My story

I have been dreaming about studying abroad since middle school. It was such an accident, but Finland was the first country I learned about when I started searching for abroad opportunities. It was brief and quickly turned down because I thought that they had financial assistance only for Finnish programs.

Since high school, I have been hoping to get into South Korean universities. I was a K-pop fan and loved Korean culture in general, even started learning Korean, but at the end of high school I couldn’t even apply to universities because of my lack of information and procrastination, so I ended up having a Bachelor’s degree in my city, Astana.

I specifically chose a university that had a good experience of sending students abroad for an exchange to have a semester in South Korea, but by the time I could apply (and I did), COVID hit and they closed their borders. I was so devastated, but I decided to still have the experience of studying abroad, so I chose a remote option in Poland.

I started preparing applications for master’s really late: at the end of my 3rd year of bachelor’s. Even though I got offers from the University of Padua and University of Bologne (Italy), the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and almost a fully-funded scholarship from a Korean university, I decided to not accept any and apply again next year (I didn’t accept an offer from Korea, because the university was not highly rated and it was located in a very small town far from the big cities).

I didn’t know about my program until next year, strangely. The second time, I managed to apply only to Saudi Arabia and several Erasmus programs when I got the offer from EDISS. They were the first ones to send me any feedback on my application and let me tell you, after I opened the email and read the offer, I was crying so much it was hard to breathe. I didn’t believe it until the very beginning of the program and sometimes I am still in awe. This program has given me so many opportunities and such wonderful people, and I want you to experience it too, so let me tell you more about my application process.

My profile and application process

Throughout my bachelor’s study, I had several internships in Cybersecurity and IoT; also, I had a 1-year work experience as a GIS developer. My IELTS score was 7.5. My GPA was not high (3.46/4.0), but I believe that my motivation and previous experience were clear and pretty good.

The deadline for this program is mostly the 2nd of January. They start having online Q&A sessions in October, I highly recommend you to attend them, if you are interested.

The most unique thing about this program is that instead of a motivational letter, they require a motivational video. It should be short, not longer than 3 minutes, but the content should include a bit about yourself and your motivation. There are no guidelines on how the video should look, so you can be as creative as possible and do whatever you want, as long as you show them why you really want to get into this program.

Who are you?
Why do you want to study there?
For what, what is your end goal?

These are the questions they want answers to.

With these, you also certainly need to upload your CV, recommendation letters, and transcript. They also ask for a very short summary of your application (not more than 150 words) of your motivation. You can write the same thing you included in your video, or add something else.

Conclusion

The program is very unique in the sense that it values creativity and combines several fields together. It is not the choice for you if you want to go into deep scientific research or learn the basics. We do learn basics, but it is needed to then apply this knowledge to other areas and make something unique and new.

I will be happy to answer any questions you have, so don’t hesitate to text me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mira.edem/ or Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirabud/

Good luck with your application, I am sure you will get the offer you truly need!