Jenni Raitoharju
I am an Assistant Professor of Signal Processing at the Faculty of Information Technology at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥. A large part of my work consists of supervising post graduate students and master’s thesis writers as well as doing research. Sometimes I also teach, which takes a surprising amount of time, especially if I prepare the course materials myself!
The best thing about working in my field is the variability. Sometimes I can do challenging, highly theoretical and mathematical tasks, and sometimes something completely different. For example, as a researcher I have been able to pretend to be drowning in the sea when collecting data for a sea rescue drone, and in environmental monitoring tasks I have collected samples from the bottom of a river.
I could have never imagined the things I would get to explore in my career. The varied tasks make the work interesting. They also allow to experience new things within my own field.
Work brought me to Jyväskylä by chance
To some extent, my career choices have been more by accident than design. The fact that I was good at mathematics led me to Tampere University of Technology after high school. I changed my major a few times before I discovered my interest in machine learning through a summer job.
I did my PhD on swarm optimization methods and simultaneously participated in several different projects, through which I was exposed to machine learning methods and applications in a variety of ways. Through these side projects, I got familiar also with environmental monitoring. I thought that machine learning applications have a lot of potential to advance the monitoring efforts, so I applied Academy postdoctoral funding for this topic. I got the funding, and this took me to the Finnish Environment Institute in Jyväskylä for three years.
When my project at the Environment Institute was approaching its end, my current position at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ was conveniently open. I ended up here without knowing much in advance, as I hadn't, for example, studied at the Ä¢¹½Ö±²¥ myself. However, I have enjoyed my time here! I feel that I am trusted and that my opinions are valued.
Commuting while listening to audio books
I don't live in Jyväskylä myself, instead I work remotely most of the time - I visit the university once or twice a week. My work involves a lot of computer work and other things that I can do from home. The arrangement suits my situation very well. Even the travel to work is comfortable when I get to listen to audio books.
The only thing that might be easier on site is meeting new people. I've gotten to know some of my colleagues, but I think I could also get to know people I don't work with during coffee breaks, for instance. That's why I think it's really important to organise events and activities so that staff can get to know each other.
