Question

Please take this opportunity to introduce yourself, share what your home campus is, what your degree program and career goals are. Tell us something that motivates you to persevere in your educational journey. As you begin the journey into this new course, describe what you believe to be your strengths and challenges as a learner. Provide examples as to how you plan to leverage these strengths and meet the challenges in the online environment? If you would like, though not mandatory, you can introduce yourself in a video answering these questions.

Answer 1

Hey there, I'm a student of economics from Aarhus University. Our campus is extremely big and with lots of students from different countries. We are a pretty diverse campus and have teachers from all over the world who come to this tiny little town to teach us.

With the amazing verdant hills and the mild temperatures all over the year, Aarhus remains as one of the best, if not the best, universities in the world in terms of education and experience. The courses are designed in such a way that the students get a full idea and grasp over the matter. Apart from the textbook knowledge, we are expected to learn and analyse real life situations and case studies in economics. This, I believe, makes the learning more holistic and compact.

My degree program is Graduate school. In other words, I'm a Masters student. My goal is to become an investment banker or an entrepreneur. I'm very interested in financial business sector and would like to create new services for the people and make life easier.

Although I'm a student of economics, but the motivation behind joining this course was to do something different for the society. From my childhood, I've been an inquisitive child and wanted to know the answers of questions that bothered me a lot. I used to think why the poor stays poor forever and what causes the rich to grow richer every year. I also wanted to know how to efficiently and effectively make people live a good life and reduce poverty from the world, or rather eradicate it. I was curious about how the economy performs and what causes development and growth.

In this new course, my stregths are that I've an extremely inquisitive bend of mind. The things which make me curious are the things that most of us take for granted. I also like to do something for the society, as I mentioned earlier and I love solving problems. I find it really exciting when I'm solving any problem and I'm asked to think on the solution. I believe that's the best part of this course. You can apply your brains in real life situations which, at times, can also make you decide your life well. It makes us more vigilant, cautious, rational and inquisitive.

The strengths are not without some of the weakness I have as well. I'm too impatient at times which have messed with my studies and research. Sometimes I'm scared at the intense volume of books I've to read and the data I've to handle. I also find it boring if the teacher can't convey a particular topic clearly in class. I like people who have good conversational skills and hence I can get really moody.

Post pandemic era, the online environment of teaching has become more common than ever. While I strongly believe that a classroom lecture can't have a better alternative, I had to accept online platforms because the flexibility it offers. You can virtually start a class anytime and anywhere in the world. The only thing that pesters me a lot about it is the ability to indulge in proper question answers as we do in class. Also there is no substitute for "chalk and talk".

Given this, I'm trying to leverage my strengths to combat the weaknesses in a variety of different ways. I've tried to study the portions that they are teaching us online and prepared the questions on it. Next, I've been sending emails to the respective teachers so that we can organise for a doubt clearing online class or even a one to one session. That way, I can clear my doubts and regain my interests which were fast waning due to the introduction of online environment.

I've also tried to keep in touch with my peers and in our discussion forums we talk and debate regularly on many contemporary topics. That can help us to be curious on different topics and I can be really able to unleash my true potential.