My Erasmus Experience-MAIA
Education with Travel & Cultural Experience
I have completed my Erasmus Joint Master in Medical imaging and Applications last year. Over the past year, many people asked me about my Erasmus experiences, still, I get this question on average four times a week. So, I think now it’s a good time to write up my experience in a nice and short post.
It all began the day I got my acceptance email from @MAIA. I couldn’t even believe my eyes and right away I forward that email to my undergrad supervisor to check if eyes are still ok. After completing MAIA, I can definitely say it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me.
As it is a Master's degree program let’s start with the study part. My program was all about medical imaging and its application as you have already guessed it from the name. From my undergrad, I was queried about biomedical applications and that lead me to my undergrad final year project where I and my project meets developed a biopotential device for ECG, EEG, and EMG. My undergrad was in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. When I started MAIA it was full of programming, which I had very little skill. I struggle a lot for a couple of months but fortunately, I was able to pick the flow and coding skills needed. Now I must say coding is one of the COOL things to do when you especially work with image processing. Throughout my course works, we had done a number of small projects and lab works which allows us to expand and polish our programming skills.
On my personal website (https://fitushar.netlify.app/), I have listed most of my projects and my Github (github.com/fitushar) also hosts most of these codes, if you are queries enough can have a look.
One of the most exciting parts of my Master’s program was that I studied in 4 different universities in four different counties (Franse, Italy, Spain, and USA). Yes, you are reading it right I completed my masters in 4 different universities on two continents.
Now the most interesting part of Erasmus is the cultural and travel experience.
Cultural and Travel Experience
Here is my favorite thing about Erasmus, you can experience a different number of cultures, food, and most importantly people. I count myself a blessed one as I had the opportunity to meet with so many wonderful people throughout my Erasmus journey.
I now live in the USA for a year and a half, and I can feel that I do miss the traveling aspects of Europe. I am referring here pre-COVID world, hopefully, things will be better soon. So where I was, ah about traveling. Traveling is upper easy and convenient throughout Europe. The flights are super cheap and you can probably take a bus to any other country. I do remember I took a flight from Germany to France for which I paid 25 euro total, isn’t it cool?
About accommodation, Hostels are super convenient when you want to travel at a low cost and don’t get me wrong some of those are super nice to stay in.#Hostel world is a great app you will find wonderful options over there at a very low cost, and yes AIR BNB is another cool option.
One more thing I would like to add if you are under 26 on many tickets you may elect to get some discounts especially in France and Italy so check if you get lucky. I was fortunate enough to travel to more than 10 countries, I could have done more but I kind of get lazy. Venice (Italy) is my favorite spot, and will always be, I guess for some special reasons :).
Hope next time I will write another post about my few fun trips. Till then if you are also interested to get to know about this European Union fully funded Master programs you can have a quick look at my this post I wrote long ago: https://fitushar.netlify.app/post/internal-project/
