Personal experience as student in Tallinn Technical University.

I come from Estonia and study 4th year in Tallinn Technical University. My specialisation is Product Development in the field of Mechanical Engineering. In my presentation I would like to give you overview of our university its main goals, working fields and activities and share my personal experience as a student. The mission of Tallinn Technical University is to provide educational, research and innovation services in the fields of engineering and entrepreneurship, which are internationally competitive and significant for Estonia's sustained development. Founded in 1918 as an engineering college (university status was granted in 1936), TTU has now become one of the largest universities in Estonia. TTU offers a wide variety of educational degree programmes in the bachelor, master and doctoral level, which include both traditional and new fields of modern technology, economics and business.

The University is structured into eight faculties, three colleges and six research and development institutions. The student body of TTU approximates 10,000, with female student ratio amounting a bit higher than one third. I would like to bring out the number of female students in Tallinn Technical University and as you can see in the graph, the least girls, 16%, study in the faculty of mechanical engineering, which is the faculty where I am.

Number of female and male students (as of Oct.1, 2002)

Percentage of female students by faculties (as of Oct.1, 2002)

TTU is a highly internationally oriented university. Following the Bologna declaration, signed by a large number of European countries, TTU transferred to the 3+2 year programme (three years of bachelor and two years of master studies). This five-year engineering curriculum promotes development of quality and effectiveness.

In cooperation with TTU Innovation centre in order to promote economy, a spin-off programme has been developed at TTU, which aims at commercialising research and development products and creating favourable conditions and motivation for promoting economy. TTU is an initiator in developing research-intensive enterprise environment.

In the long term TTU plans to set up an international-level technology centre in Tallinn – the so called Technopolis that would be based on TTU as an educational and Competence Centre, Technology Park and social infrastructure such as sports facilities, student campus, housing state for academic staff, etc.

Open to international cooperation, TTU participates in several European Union programmes, is involved in international research and development agreements, and has acquired over a hundred individual research grants from different foundations and organizations.

Personal experience as student in Tallinn Technical University.

When I first started to study at Tallinn Technical University it seemed so huge and complicated institution, and sometimes it was really difficult to find what you needed. But once the system was understood it got much easier.

During time of studies I have faced lots of challenges, the compulsory courses were sometimes sophisticated and required very strong base knowledge of mathematics and physics, but now on 4th year I see that the efforts during the fist years were worthwhile.

A number of very interesting subjects are provided which allow to use creativity, innovation and practice what is studied in theory. Would like to bring forth some courses what have been especially interesting for me. One of those is certainly Problem Solving course, where we studied different ways how to approach various problems, the process of solving them, also group work was interesting, and as a course project we had to find practical problem from life and invent or improve a machine which would solve it, chosen by ourselves.

The continuation for this subject was Integrated Product Development, where the assignment was to invent new machine and as the result of group work. Our group had lots of different ideas and finally we decided for machine that puts wallpaper on the wall. It was challenge to form it according to technical standards, but a good practice.

One innovative event whish is annual and this year again carried out is international robot building mechantronics competition in cooperation with Royal Institute of Technology and University of Tartu, where students of TTU are going to participate actively.

Lately our professors at university have started to emphasise the practical side of studies and bring us more examples from life. It is allowed to make course projects for companies or in cooperation with company, if students have interest in that.

This will bring the companies closer to university and develops relationship between companies and students. Though I sometimes think that the information exchange between companies and students could be better. Usually companies communicate with university and professors, but not directly to students. It would be interesting for students to know more, what kind of companies exist, what they manufacture and what kind of employees they need. So that they could better prepare themselves for labour market or for entrepreneurship. Lots of students already start to work during their studying years.

All in all considering that Estonia gained its independence in 1991, and faced a very big challenge: it had to switch from the pre-communist system to a market economy and so the entrepreneurship traditions are something new to us and there is lots of room for improvements.

The same thing is in the field of product development, during Soviet Union time more attention was put into manufacturing process than to development and innovation.

All in all I believe that Estonia is well adoptable and will manage in the rapidly changing informative world.