THE BEGINNING OF TUASpire
This blog is a part of the Sales semester at Turku University of Applied Sciences, written by four exchange students who will spend the academic year 2020-2021 in Turku.
How this blog came to life?
This blog has been created to share our Erasmus student year and also to promote future students to set up coming here and try Timo Holopainen’s lessons, and in addition to show the education system in Turku University of Applied Sciences (Turku UAS) and in Finland. This project will be led during the autumn semester 2020. At the same time, members of this work group were chosen randomly with the same interest for social media. Finally, one of our main goal is to contribute to the discovery of interesting points, activities, trips, meals, differences between countries, in Turku and its surroundings.
Our team consists of four very bright and open-minded students – Baptiste, Ana, Verena and Yannik – from very different countries. Let’s start with Baptiste, a 22-year old Business and Management student from the South of France. According to Ana, who is also Baptiste’s neighbor at the Student Village, he is very good with people and one of the friendliest guys she knows.
Next comes Ana who exchanged the sun-blessed weather in Madrid with a sky covered in clouds and frequent showers in Turku. She is also 22 years old and is studying Digital Business with Marketing. Baptiste described her as very fun to be around!
Moving on to the next two Germans who both are from Bavaria, both came from the same university, studying European Business in Regensburg and both of them are 20 years old. First, we have Verena who is living in a very small city, 5 minutes from the Czech border. Second we have Yannik who is living in Falkenstein (which only has about 3600 inhabitants). Verena describes him as sport-enthusiastic and Yannik thinks she is very creative.
As you can see, all of us have diverse personalities, however, we all chose to spend the next two semesters in the lovely city with the name of Turku – which is colder than we expected (and it is only September… Well, it will be a fun experience).
How were our first days like?
Baptiste: Sleeping a lot and setting up my room. Walking a lot along the river and spending time at the Harbour with my friends.
Ana: I was very happy to come here by my own, but I can’t deny feeling afraid as I didn’t know anybody. Luckily, it is very easy to make friend around here. Anyway, the first days seemed crazy because of buying all of the things that were still needed to settle in properly. I spent many hours getting through a maze which is also commonly known as IKEA.
Verena: The first days were quite basic: cleaning, setting up my room and mainly walking around the forest and to the lake. (I come from a town that is surrounded by a forest which is why the Finnish forest makes me feel very nostalgic and at home).
Yannik: I was quite overwhelmed the first days due to the long bus ride and the apartment was not really clean – I mean seriously… Who the heck used to live there?! After some shopping trips, I tried to explore the city: Visiting the castle, the city center and a lot more.
That’s it for today’s entry and stay tuned for what’s to come!
Your TUASpire TEAM