Sadly this is more of a rant at this point because I am not in my best state to write this, but I need to so there you go. I am creating this post hoping that in the future my 21 year old self will read it and make a better informed decision.

Context: I have moved to Finland in August 2023 for my Master’s Degree in Robotics. It was a tough decision I made between going to Uppsala, SE or Turku, FI. Then I came here, the course was shit, I realized I don’t like the field that much and opportunities in my area are shit so I think I’d be better off in Sweden. I still have an aftertaste of frustration honestly, so take things I say with a good grain of salt.

People say “rumination is bad for you”, I say “doing shit that make you sick is the real issue”.

A bit into language

Finnish is a super old uralic language that did not have a writing system until the swedes conquered the region and started unifying the amount of dialects. There are no peers to this language apart from Estonian, Hungarian, and dialects like Ingrian. And Hungarian is already non inteligible. Finnish is part of an isolated language group that has neither Latin nor Germanic nor Slavic roots. Not even protoindoeuropean. And people speak in dialects and there are 2 versions of the language: spoken and written. This has several aftermaths in openess for immigrants in education, work and overall culture that we will cover shortly.

Conclusion: you need at least 4 years immersed in the language to have a basic working level (on average) Finnish that would let you do more than just say “Thank you” (kiitos), “How much does it cost?” (Mitä se maksaa?) or “One coffee please” (Yks kahvi kiitos).

Education

Finland has the best public universal free state-funded widely-available distributed equal education system in the world (allegedly). That’s right. But it is for BASIC education. Yes, BASIC EDUCATION. So from kindergarten (päiväkoti) to highschool, educaiton is free and high quality. The scenario changes a lot when we look at upper education. I came from a Top 100 university according to the QS ranking. I see the difference, not in funding but in people. While back there you had high competition, and highly talented and motivated people would get in, here you get curious people to share a course with you.

Conclusion: you are likely to be in the same class as a congregate of acephalous specimens. Unless you go to the best universities, the next topic.

Universities

Finland is a 5 million people country. A city is considered large here if it has more than 200k people in the vicinity. There are a few universities here: Aalto University, Helsinki University, University of Turku, Tampere University, Lappenranta University, Oulu University. Some of them are better than others, but is heavily dependent on the course. I would risk saying that maybe the first 2 are safe choices for all courses, but I can maybe bit my tongue. There are some prominent research groups in all of them, and honestly, my mistake was not following my passion (biotechnology) and going into the easy path (manufacturing).

Research groups

Please, I say PLEASE! Repeat with me: “I will research the research group before even considering going anywhere”. Once again: “I will research the research group before even considering going anywhere”. There are research groups and research groups, and you really need to see to find the best one for you.

Life as an international student is dissociated

Unless you are an Erasmus student with the sole hedonistic goal of partying and mating and traveling and partying 9 days a week for a semester, doing a whole degree is a completely different experience. You want to integrate, you want to do projects, you want to meet like-minded people. But alas! In this country, the mental overhead for people to speak simple and sound english is probably anvilish heavy (looney tunes ref.) as to make them resort to ostracism. Options left: stick to international people. While this is not necessarily bad, we incur in some problems: the student organizations are 99% in finnish, by finnish people. If you go there, people will actually look at you with this face “what are you doing here?”, or “do I really have to speak in English just because of this jerk?”. Not very welcoming. Plus the people who actively do bad things such as being racist and anti immigration, but I luckily haven’t encountered many, just a few dickheads.

Grading system

The grading system, at least in higher education, goes from 0-5. 0 means fail, 1-5 means pass. It would be the same as in a 10 point grading system, 6+ pass, mapping 0-5 to 0, and 6 and etc to 1-5. So if you get a 0 you don’t know in fact how close you were to passing. Also, you do not get floating point scores in the end, everything gets rounded. Although seems like a simplification, I feel like lecturers in general are.

“Too many rights”

A common thing I hear people complaining about is that “it is hard to kick a student out of the university”. This means that once you are in, you have LOTS of resources to keep the ball rolling without much effort. You have rights by law to take an exam at least 3 times, a lot of flexibility with the studies, options and options etc. They are good things, but in practice the system is highly abused and as I said before, students just trick the system to get the diploma.

Work

Ahhhh the nice smell of selling your soul for someone else to profit, where do I start? It is very difficult to get a job as an international, since having a foreign name will already reduce your chances probably 5 fold, plus they rule you out for not knowing Finnish. There are some attempts, like “International House (your city here)” or “Study and Stay in (your city here)”, but they are recent, small, and not in line with the government.

On top of that, the job market is itself small, and the few opportunities you will see are very likely not in the area you like / have experience in, and the other few positions open are hidden. And out of the few positions, most of them will be in the capital, Helsinki, so coming to a smaller city was pointless since the beginning. Great. Yes, HIDDEN. They proudly call it the “shadow” job market, stating that it is because of trust issues and so on an so forth. Great.

Conclusion: good luck getting a job that is not in the university.

Conclusion

A 5 million people country that is seeing a population decline can really sustain itself, am I right? It will keep being uptight and oblivious about what is happening and the immigration policies that are being now made more strict. At the same time a country that is not investing in automation and creating more and more public debt.

A good recipe I see.