Per Fagrell on his role as programme coordinator

What is the mission of your role?

I will support and coordinate the work with Future Education. So far, it is hard to say its full scope of it so early in the process. Still, I believe that I will, among other things, contribute to the development of knowledge bases with method support, method development and knowledge sharing and coordinate the development work that takes place at the schools, in educational programs and the operational support.

What have you done at KTH before?

Even though I have only been employed at KTH since the autumn of 2020, I have been active here at KTH even before I became employed. For example, Working in the early 2000s at a trade association in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, I got responsible for the reception of new chemistry students on their first day at KTH. We invited them to dinner and hired some chemistry alumni to tell the freshmen about their time at KTH and what they did after graduation. It was an appreciated activity that I did for eight years.

Then I was an external member of KTH's faculty council for a period and learned a lot about KTH as an organisation. After that, I became an industrial doctoral student at the old ECE* school (now ITM), parallel with my day job at Teknikföretagen. I did my public defence of doctoral thesis in the summer of 2020 and then applied for a postdoc position linked to ITM Learning. Thought that at some point in my life, I would have the luxury of concentrating on just one thing. It went so-so. Within a year, I was hired as operations manager for the strategic partnerships at KTH, and I have been doing that until now. Now in the spring of 2023, I am gradually phasing out these tasks and will be working with the programme Future Education full-time by midsummer at the latest.

Why do you want to work with the Future Education programme?

Since the end of the 1990s, I have worked with educational development in various ways. But it was always from the employers' perspective. And often linked to issues that deal with collaboration in different ways; adjunct professors, program councils/industry councils, quality and relevance, etc. My thesis was also about the development of engineering education. Therefore I didn't think twice when I was asked before Christmas if I could take on this assignment. It is rare that a higher education institution tries to take a more comprehensive approach to its education, so I feel excited to have the chance to be involved in that work.

*The ECE school (School of Education and Communication in Engineering Sciences) was one of the five schools that closed when ten schools became five in the 2018 reorganisation.