During my Christmas holiday, my family and I spent a month in the sparsely populated ‘city’ of Taos in New Mexico, USA. As an Aalto Ambassador seeking prospective American students, my aim is to recruit interested parties from all regions I visit for both business and leisure purposes. As a result of this, I am able to attract talent from parts of the country that would otherwise go overlooked.
China’s tycoon, Jack Ma, recently said that we need to reform our educational system in a way that will help our next generations to cope up with the age of machines. Although the gist of the conversation was that automation and robotics are going to replace human beings in future and unemployment will be a severe problem if not tackled with adopting new educational system.
Finland is truly a world leader in education when it comes to adopting and setting new standards of education. Freedom of selection of subjects is one of the greatest benefits of studying at Finland and Aalto University takes it to higher level with its world class research labs and faculty. Whether a student is from business technology or from school of design, he/she can always join any course offered from School of Engineering or School of Science. Even if someone is interested in joining a particular subject.
It is not the first time that Aalto University makes connections with this one of the three oldest art colleges in China – Hubei Institute of Fine Arts(HIFA). In 2015, there was visiting professors giving lectures and organizing workshops at HIFA.
However, students and teachers from HIFA had a chance to get to know Aalto from a fresh and different perspective – a presentation given by Aalto Student Ambassador who come from current students at Aalto, me Yuzhou Wang.
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
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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I was anxious before arriving to Helsinki in the beginning of September, because I couldn’t join the orientation and was afraid of being left behind. Once I arrived, the study coordinator from the school of ARTS, Naoko Nakagawa of Creative Sustainability (CS), provided great assistance to help me start my study in Aalto. Ms. Nakagawa scheduled a special session to explain the study structure of the CS program and helped me decide what courses to take the first period.
Creative Sustainability Program is an international joint master’s degree program of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, the School of Business and the School of Engineering. It is a very unique program for students from various backgrounds to receive multidisciplinary trainings and get inspired from each other in the field of sustainability. In the second week, CS program organized a kick-off day to introduce the courses and projects from the different schools. All the courses and projects were so good, and the professors were devoted and charismatic. I felt very excited about my future study and wished to take all the courses! I was so grateful to have the chance to know more about the courses, projects and professors in the beginning of the program, this was something I never had in the schools of my home country Taiwan. A kick-off day was a brilliant idea to show students what to expect for the CS program in next two years and helping us put together our own personal study plan.
