Juha‑Matti Tilli — Education
Studies
I initially studied for Bachelor of Science in Technology starting 2006, picking electrical engineering department of Aalto University and I had extended basic science studies. I was accepted twice to those studies based on two different acceptance criteria even though I never did the entry exam. My selection was electrical engineering since I was uncertain what I should study (another interesting field could be computer science and a third interesting field could be technical physics and mathematics). My opinion was that the extended basic science studies were a good substitute for technical physics and mathematics, and my experience in computer science was strong so studying something else could be valuable. When I started my studies, electrical engineering department was by far the most diverse, offering the most choice for specialization.
Even before my studies, I had experience from micro and nanotechnology working at Micronova at Aalto University, so I picked physics of electromagnetism as my major complementing the extended basic science studies as my minor. My success in studies was excellent (Bachelor's GPA 4.79).
However, soon it started to become clear to me that the private sector job opportunities in micro and nanotechnology were lacking in Finland so I decided to obtain job experience from software development industry. That led to nearly abandoning my studies.
However, I graduated as Bachelor of Science and later as Master of Science. For my Master of Science degree, the major was micro and nanotechnology, but I picked software technology from computer science department as my minor. None of my computer science courses had a grade less than the maximum possible. My Master's GPA was 4.86.
Later, when working in Nokia I started to plan doctoral studies in communications engineering. That communications engineering was a field I almost completely missed when selecting what I should study in 2006. My specialty in communications engineering is fast userspace packet processing and implementing Internet standard protocols in software using C. However, later it turned out that doctoral studies would require too much work, so I decided to do a Licentiate thesis to get some degree from that, putting the non-essential material into that Licentiate thesis, saving the essential material for a possible doctoral dissertation. Success in the studies was good here as well, but my GPA was somewhat dragged down by one course with lacking resources, where only two of the students passed the exam (with a rather poor grade 2/5) and I was one of those. Nevertheless, my GPA was 4.14.
If I ever finish my doctoral studies, the subject of my thesis will be "Fast userspace packet processing".