Changing jobs is always exiting, especially when that change is accompanied by a change in the field of research.

I started in the Agile Education Research Group RAGE in the summer of 2014, still working at the time on my bachelor’s degree in language technology. While my original focus was on developing the University of Helsinki’s programming assignment submission and checking system TestMyCode, I quickly started to participate in some of the research done within the group.

This lead to a strong love for the learning analytics and educational data mining fields, where I’ve so far published 3 articles with one more in press and four in review. I ended up changing majors to Computer Science and selecting a learning analytics focused topic for my master’s thesis. Unfortunately, during the late 2016 it became apparent that the research group would not be able to fully fund my upcoming PhD studies. It was time to look around.

I ended up working for around three months for the Tampere University of Technology – we’d previously collaborated with them on some of the papers – at the end of 2016. During this time, I heard of a wonderful new opportunity at the Discovery group of UH CS Department: they were starting a project called Immersive Automation to study the automation of newsrooms and news production. I applied and was accepted to join the 18 month project.

While the physical move was a small one (from one end of the building to the other), the shift in terms of the research problems and the group dynamics was huge. Yet, I embrace this change wholehartedly.

I’m not a believer in “all change is good”, and change for change’s sake. But I do recognice that change of perspective brings forth new ideas and causes one to evaluate the previously set-in-stone things. These first four months have been of constant learning and I believe that the skills that I’ve learned here will be valuable, whether my future research is in educational data mining an learning analytics or natural language generation. Or perhaps I’ll end up working on some combination of these fields.

Only time will tell.