{"id":1984,"date":"2017-01-21T11:58:12","date_gmt":"2017-01-21T11:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www2.ift.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/?p=1984"},"modified":"2017-05-24T03:25:30","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T02:25:30","slug":"life-lessons-in-finnish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/life-lessons-in-finnish\/","title":{"rendered":"Life lessons in Finnish"},"content":{"rendered":"\u4e2d\u6587\u6458\u8981 \/ Summary in Chinese<\/span>\nFinland may seldom be the first choice of country for students contemplating doing a foreign exchange. But undergraduate Erato Li, who is in Year 3 of the IFT Heritage Management programme, says Finland should be near the top of the list.<\/p>\n

Erato spent the second semester of academic year 2015\/16 as an exchange student at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki. Her choice surprised some people. \u201cI wanted to pick a place with a culture that was not easily accessible,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In Finland, she found a culture that is rooted in its natural surroundings and that blooms in its architecture \u2013 and those aspects of the country overwhelmed her. Her experiences there included taking a traditional Finnish sauna bath and visiting national parks.<\/p>\n

Finland also served as a convenient base for her exploration of other parts of Europe. \u201cI was able to travel to more than 10 European countries during my time as an exchange student,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences offers no courses directly relevant to Erato\u2019s study of heritage management. \u201cBut I could learn languages,\u201d she says. \u201cI chose Finnish and French.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teaching methods surprised her. Among the surprises was an aspect of the course the university offers on international human resource management. \u201cThere is a student presentation every week based on a case study,\u201d she says. \u201cFollowing the presentation, there is a peer review of it, and industry representatives also came to offer lectures to students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Viking life<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most rewarding experiences Erato had in Europe was not in Finland but in neighbouring Sweden. There she volunteered to work in the Foteviken Museum, an open-air museum of archeology which conveys how life may have been in a Scandinavian town toward the end of Europe\u2019s Viking Age. Along with the usual sorts of exhibit, the museum has a replica of a Viking settlement consisting of 23 buildings and the performers that populate it. The museum also has a replica of a Viking ship.<\/p>\n

Erato volunteered to be a performer. \u201cAs a volunteer, you could work as a blacksmith, baker or seamstress. I worked as a baker, and I helped with welcoming tourists and telling them about Viking culture,\u201d she says. She was the only Chinese among the volunteers at the museum. It was an edifying experience for a student of heritage management, giving plenty of opportunities to learn more about Viking culture and Norse myths.<\/p>\n

She recommends that IFT undergraduates consider Finland as a place to do an exchange and not simply because of what they can learn there. \u201cThe most impressive part about the programme was that I made many friends there. Every day I had to speak in English, as I had roommates from the Netherlands and Mexico,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve become more independent and I got bolder in reaching out to people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finland may seldom be the first choice of country for students contemplating doing a foreign exchange. But undergraduate Erato Li, who is in Year 3 of the IFT Heritage Management […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[188,187,189,191,176,190],"class_list":["post-1984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-utm-around-the-world","tag-erato-li","tag-finland","tag-haaga-helia-university-of-applied-sciences","tag-helsinki","tag-heritage-management","tag-sweden"],"views":1041,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.utm.edu.mo\/NewsPortal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}