Orientation to the Ilmajoki Campus

The first couple days at Ilmajoki were reminiscent of Cal Poly’s Week of Welcome, one of the best student orientation programs in the United States.  We were gathered in the auditorium for a welcome presentation that was summarized in English to us but we missed quite a bit by not knowing any Finnish. University staff broke the incoming students up into groups led by second and third year students for a tour around the campus.  The student leaders are easy to identify because they all have jumpsuits with different patches and advertisements they get from sponsors while raising money for an international trip during their second year of classes. The Cal Poly students were split into two groups and put with leaders who could explain the tour briefly in English after discussing interest points in Finnish to the rest of the students.

We were shown the cow house, pig farm, machinery sheds, agriculture fields, gardens, classrooms and more.  Group interaction was fostered by a list of questions we were to answer regarding tour stops. We were pleased to see that Seinajoki values “Learn by Doing” as much as Cal Poly and it is evident in the way the older students share their experiences and explain what type of activities we will be responsible for throughout our schooling.  

It was nice to get out of our isolated English-speaking group and mingle with some Finnish students. Upon arrival in Ilmakoji the Cal Poly students were concerned about making friends because the other students did not seem to want much to do with us. We learned very quickly it was not a matter of friendliness, in fact the Finnish students are very interesting, like to have fun and are similar to us in many ways.  They are a little shy at first and unsure of their English skills but once they get chatting its very easy to make friends.

On the second day we were taken to Tuomarniemi, a school forest learning facility to play icebreaker games, get comfortable with the other students and have some fun out in the woods.  At the site we found a wooden statue of two figures cross cut sawing that I saw online months ago while googling the school! We enjoyed jumping in the refreshing lake (by the way, there are nearly 200,000 lakes in Finland) followed by a hot sauna and roasting frankfurters over an open fire. After that, the student leaders put on a funny skit for us and we were bussed back to Ilmajoki.

It was overwhelming in the beginning being the only five students who did not speak Finnish. We felt like we were missing out on a lot of information and some camaraderie as the ignorant monolingual Americans. However, in just two days we had many of our acquaintances translating for us and we did not feel nearly as isolated. If anything it gave us much greater incentive to pay close attention in our first Finnish lesson the next day.