The Riihimäki campus of HAMK offers a degree programme taught fully in English: Mechanical Engineering and Production Technology. Every year many students from different countries enroll in this programme, which means they will be residing in Finland for 4 years.
Besides those students, the campus has also a couple of temporary visitors: 6 Erasmus students staying in Finland for a period varying from 4 to 10 months.
This sounds probably familiar to everyones ears:
“Being an exchange student is the best time of your life!”
But is that really true? What makes it so spectacular? And why would students want to come to the cold Finland?
Lets ask it the “Erasmus-students” themselves…
Daniel, Frank, Kosta and Simon are representing Germany, where they study at the Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) in Koblenz. After a week of road tripping through Germany-Denmark-Sweden-Finland, they will continue exploring the Finnish roads for the next semester.
Arnaud is the French exchange student. He studies at Universite de Valenciennes and chose to study in Finland during the whole academic year. Finally, there is also one girl amongst the exchange students: that is me, An. I am from Belgium, and I will be studying also at HAMK until May 2007.
So, we are a small group, living amongst the other foreign students at Merkuriuksenkatu in Peltosaari student apartments.
All 6 of us agree… choosing to be an exchange student has a couple of main reasons:
- learning a new language
- having some international experience on their CV
- wanting an adventure
- meeting new cultures and people
- learning to be independent
None of us actually came here to learn Finnish, it is a difficult language spoken only by the Finns. But luckily Finland is known to have a good spoken level of English - of course not so good as in the UK, but face it… who wants to go to a country where pubs close at 11 pm and it does not stop neither raining nor blowing? Scandinavia is unlike any other European country, it is kind of undiscovered, and the nature is known to be amazing.
Riihimäki is not a city you would just pick out of the map to go to study at. But the Erasmus contracts work based on mutual contracts between two universities. And HAMK Riihimäki was the only university that was offered here in Finland. For everybody, hearing the name of the city did not ring any bells and it was hard to find some English information about it. But whatever… that just made the adventure more interesting!
The campus is quite small, which allows a friendly and open atmosphere. The closeness between teachers and students invites you to participate in the lessons and encourages you to ask any question that pops into your mind.
Having been here now about one month, we all agree on the following points:
- Finnish people have been very friendly and open
- The nature – especially the lakes – is amazing
- Riihimäki is small but it has a friendly and cosy atmosphere, it quickly gives you the feeling of “home”.
Of course, it is sometimes hard to be so far from home, not having your friends around and having to deal with the everyday issues in another language. But it is wonderful how the hospitality and the special connection between other foreign students beat that. Everybody has the same scenario as you; they arrived here alone and have nobody around. Within a fraction of time the bonding is so strong that it becomes the greatest experience of your life!
