A glimpse of last autumn’s orientation week

My study semester at Aalto University started with orientation week. During my bachelor’s studies, I had the experience of orientation ‘day’ back in my home university in Pakistan. A typical orientation day included enrolment tasks, talks about university value and code of conduct and a brief tour of the campus. So orientation ‘week’ made me wonder what to expect and it included all the right things to start the semester, starting from enrollment to a lot of parties.

Orientation week at Aalto has two kinds of activities.

Photo by Roee Cohen

Photo by Roee Cohen

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Finland Winter – A time for reflection

I come from a Asian country where the sun shine 12 hour a day year-round. There, I also spent the first 24 year of my life in the same town, thus the frequency of encountering an acquaintance every time you head out is more than twice a day.

If you are like me, then the difference you gonna experience when you come to Finland, where people like to keep things within themselves and prefer spending their vacation in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, is quite drastic. For me, that means having a lot more time spent with myself on my own, because Finns, or at least the ones I met, are mostly introverts and not quite proactive in getting to know others. Couple that with the fact that winter here last from November to March, with an average of 6 hours of sunlight daily, I guess it would be useful to consider the challenges and rewards of having lots of time, without much sunlight to cheer you up (winter scenery here is breathtaking in daytime, though), and not having too many local friends to hangout.
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