IMPIT Scholorship and Credit Transfer Issues

Dear Blogger,

I am one of the regular visitor of your blog spot and I have reaped a large information from this blog. I am extremely keen and enthusiastic to pursue my further studies in Finland , since it is one of the renowned foreign country as high quality education provider.

Dear Friend, thank you for stopping by www.nepalfinland.com. Of course, Finland is a very good country in terms of quality education. I am sure that you would get the opportunity to pursue your master's degree in Finland.

I have applied in various Universities in Master's Degree program in Information Technology though I have not got any notification of admission from Universities.

You did not mention the name of the university you applied to. Anyway, the time of admission decision is still far for Master's degree. Most of the universities are dealing with Bachelor degree at the moment and will concentrate on Master's students bit later. The result of admission will start to release by mid of May depending upon the university itself. So, don't be hurry, you have still about a month in minimum to get admission notice.

One of my friend has been studying at Joensuu in IMPIT under scholarship. He gets about 460 EURO per months. I have been regularly logging the University's website and discovered that the application session for this program has started but there is not and information concerning scholarships or financial grants. I consulted to few educational consultancies but they claim that scholarships are available and give me words that they can request to the University for scholarships, but I am well informed that they can do nothing. But I am in confusion that I might not have complete information regarding IMPIT. I would be thankful to you if you could kindly inform me the reality.

International Master's Program in Information Technology (IMPIT) is very popular and wonderful program for Nepalese students. This program is well organized and structured. Though the course track and subjects of each university differs, this is a joint program run on different three Universities, University of Joensuu, Lappeenranta University of Technology and Kuopio University. The course of University of Joensuu is focused on software engineering and image processing tracks. You can choose any of the track and get master's degree on it. The course of Lappeenranta have two major tracks, Communication Engineering and Information Processing and Information Processing have further two distinct unofficial tracks for Software Engineering and Robot Vision.

About the scholarship, it is true that it used to fund students for their living. Since education is free, the university used to pay 460 Euro per month to cover living expense. Last year, one Nepalese got funded in Lappeenranta and four Nepalese in Joensuu under IMPIT program. There are more senior Nepalese students as well who is pursuing their Master's degree under IMPIT with funds. But, the situation is changed now. From this year, there will be now living funds for you. Still the course structure, name and the degree is same, but Universities will not help you for your living. So, from this year, it is ordinary program as others in terms of scholarship. Even, you need to prove yourself to be able to fund your studies by mentioning the source of 6000 euro while filling the form as well. If you see the form carefully, you can see the Financial Statement attached at the end of the form in which you need to fill your sources of fund to fund your study yourself which was not present on the form of previous years. So, don't believe these fraud consultancies, there is no scholarship on IMPIT from this year.

However, some rumors are heard around these regions that limited students who come to IMPIT will be awarded with scholarship after their arrival to the Joensuu and Lappeenranta; but remember, these are just rumors yet and I haven't got any official information whether these rumors are true or false. The official declaration about IMPIT is just that there is no scholarship from this year onwards. So, make up your mind to fund your students yourself if you decide to come. And, it would be always good if the rumors came true and awarded scholarship to limited students after their arrival.

And next issue, I have studied many times about credit transfer but I am not understanding it well. Is there any possibility of credit transfer. Suppose, I were admitted to Lappeenranta and I would like to study in Helsinki, is it possible through Credit Transfer. Credit transfer has been the common slogans to most of the educational consultancies in Nepal, kindly clarify me.

Credit transfer for Master's degree is possible but it is not that much easy as you might have thought. It is very complex process to get credit transfer. Let me explain the process of Credit transfer with your own example of Lappeenranta University of Technology and Helsinki University of Technology.

1. To start the process, you should be eligible for credit transfer on the home university (the one which you are currently studying, in your example, Lappeenranta). So, Lappeenranta, might have some rules to quality you as eligible candidate for Credit transfer. For example, you should have completed minimum of compulsory courses or 25-30 credits of your students while entire Master degree carries 120 credits.

2. You should have a justifiable reason to transfer. For example, the Lappeenranta might permit you to transfer to Helsinki if Lappeenranta does not have a specific courses of your interest while Helsinki have or any other reason. The point is, you should be able to convince them why you want to transfer to Helsinki.

3. Helsinki should accept you as transfer student. It means, once again, you need to convince Helsinki why you want to transfer from Lappeenranta to Helsinki. In this process, Helsinki may take you several interview and might be test as well if it feels necessity.

4. Then, the process of transfer starts. Your credits will be evaluated. Again, all of your credits might not be transfers since the structure of destination university and home university would be different. So, the destination university would accommodate only the credits that fits on their structure. One more issue, every university will have their policy on grading the transfer students; so you might get only Pass/Fail grade for the transfer credits on destination university though it would be reflected on the another transcript of home university. So, If you show the transcript of Helsinki, if might have given you only Passed grade as transfer credits from Lappeenranta instead of grades 1-5 ( where 5 is the maximum, this is grading system in Finland). So, in this case, if you have scored 5 in Compiler Design in Lappeenranta, you will be loosing this distinct character of your score since it might appear only with H (pass grade).


The best way I suggest you might be, never think about Credit Transfer. Instead of thinking about credit transfer, think about exchange. Like, if you like a course in Helsinki while you are studying in Lappeenranta, get permission to study that course there, study that course in Helsinki and get back to Lappeenranta to graduate. So, the ultimate degree will be from Lappeenranta. I think, that would be a better solution.