Burnt rice, big lessons: growing into confidence at Arcada

This blog post is written by Mir Aqib Hossain, a student in the bachelor's degree programme Mechanical and Sustainable Engineering at Arcada.

I came to Finland with one suitcase, a lot of hope, and absolutely no idea how to cook. That about sums up year one.

A new country, new faces, new everything

Leaving home is one of those things that sounds exciting until you're actually doing it. New country. New language around you. New faces everywhere you look. And the people you've known your whole life—your friends, your family—suddenly on the other side of a screen.

The first few weeks at Arcada were genuinely hard. Not because the university was unwelcoming. It wasn't. But because starting over is difficult no matter how prepared you think you are.

The studying style was different from anything I had known before. Back home, I had a system—I knew how to be a student. Here, I had to relearn what that even meant. More independence. More self-direction. More figuring things out without someone telling you exactly what to do next.

And then I'd go home after class and realise I had nothing to eat because I hadn't learned how to cook.

I learned. The hard way.

Burnt rice. Overly salted everything. A few meals that were genuinely unidentifiable. But I learned.

And that, looking back, was actually the beginning of something important. Because every small thing I figured out on my own—cooking a meal, navigating the city, understanding a new assignment format—added up into something I didn't have when I arrived.

Confidence. Quiet, earned, real confidence.

Arcada didn't hand that to me. Life here did.

The people made all the difference

I won't pretend the academic side was the only thing that kept me going. Honestly? The friends I made at Arcada kept me going. It started slowly—a familiar face in class, a study session that ran longer than planned, a group chat that was supposed to be about coursework and became something much more. Before I knew it, I had a group of people around me who understood exactly what it felt like to be far from home, figuring things out in a new country.

We studied together. We cooked for each other—badly, at first, and then gradually better. We went skiing on weekends, something I never imagined doing before coming to Finland. We went rafting. We turned a student life that could have felt lonely into something I actually looked forward to every day.

Arcada has a small campus. People will tell you that like it's a limitation. It isn't.

It means you actually know people. Your classmates, your professors, the faces you pass in the corridor every day. There is a warmth to this place that I didn't expect and that I will genuinely miss.

The moment something clicked

Somewhere in the middle of all that adjusting, something happened in the lab. We were working through a concept I had studied, read about, taken notes on. I thought I understood it the way you understand something on paper.

Then I had to actually do it with my hands. And for a few minutes, nothing connected. The theory sat in my head and the equipment sat in front of me and there was a gap between them that felt impossible.

Then slowly, it closed. The abstract became physical. The formula became something I could see, measure, and hold accountable. I looked at my friend next to me and we both just knew—this is what it's supposed to feel like.

That was the moment I stopped just studying engineering and started thinking like an engineer. No lecture had done that for me. The lab did.

The final stretch is no joke

Nobody really prepares you for the third year. Everything arrives at once. Courses that had felt manageable suddenly stack up. The thesis—which existed for so long as a distant, abstract thing—becomes very real, very fast.

There were weeks where I questioned everything. Whether I was good enough. Whether I had made the right choice. Whether I was going to make it to the finish line.

But I kept moving. Imperfectly, slowly, sometimes barely—but moving. And that was enough.

After so many tries, something landed

The internship didn't come easily. I want to be honest about that. It took multiple applications. Rejections I didn't see coming. Moments where I genuinely wondered if it was going to happen for me at all. But I kept trying. And Arcada kept opening doors—industry connections, company visits, career support that pointed me in the right direction even when I felt stuck.

And eventually, one of those doors opened for me. When the internship came through, it didn't feel like luck. It felt like persistence finally paying off. Like every rejected application had quietly been preparing me for the one that said yes.

That is what I want anyone reading this to take away—not that it was easy, but that it was worth it. And that Arcada gave me the network and the foundation to keep going until it worked.

What I'm taking home

I came to Finland with one suitcase and no idea how to cook. I'm leaving with a degree, an internship, friends from across the world, ski trips I never planned, and the knowledge that I can build a life somewhere completely new—from scratch, on my own terms.

Arcada gave me the technical foundation. But this campus, these people, this country—they gave me something harder to name and more difficult to teach.

The knowledge that I am more capable than I thought. That discomfort is not a dead end. That sometimes you have to burn the rice a few times before you figure it out.

If you're thinking about coming here—do it. Just maybe watch a few cooking videos first.

Are you curious to know more about the Mechanical and Sustainable Engineering programme at Arcada? Visit the programme page and find out if it could be a match for you.