Thursday, the morning of September 1st, I wrapped up my internship. I sent off this 18-tab Excel spreadsheet filled with charts, calculations, and many, many references. After three months, I had completed the first full draft of data collection for the Pacific Islands. Of course, as it is with research, the data will need to be reviewed, further modified, and so on. So, this is just the first large step in an on-going process, but it was a moment of celebration. I sang songs and danced and just allowed myself to rejoice, in a way I don’t do often enough. I focused on what I had done, and less on what still needed doing.
For the month of September and October, I focused on studying Finnish intensively. Monday through Friday, three hours a day, I studied Finnish online with an international group of students. Our small group of 14 students represented 11 countries, and if you added the teacher, the number went up to 12.
In my May blog post, I mentioned that my Finnish wasn’t where I hoped it would be at this point, and I am really glad I had the opportunity to focus on it. My primary goal was to be able to answer simple questions quickly. When someone asks me a question, I don’t want to spend so much time processing the question or formulating a response. I want certain aspects of the basic language to become automatic, second nature. For example, I can explain what I’m doing in Finland and what I did before moving here. I can answer the basic questions people want to know about where I’m from, what languages I speak, and so on.
I ultimately want to get to a place where I can think a little bit in Finnish. When I’m riding my bicycle, I can think about what happened in my day in simple Finnish. In the initial weeks of the class, one of my classmates marveled at what I already knew of Finnish and that I had been here only one year. Oh, if that classmate only knew what my daughter and husband were able to do in Finnish in only one year!
Of course, I have no hopes of achieving Alaya’s language learning ability as I’ve passed that stage of my life. It’s also not fair for me to compare myself to the opportunity Bochuan has had the past nine months to study Finnish intensively, 5 days a-week, 6+ hours a day. But I’m ready to get to a new level with my Finnish. I want to take my passive vocabulary and grammar knowledge and make it active. I want to be able to have basic conversations with Alaya’s care takers, to make an appointment over the phone, and to improve my listening comprehension so that I at least know more of what’s going on around me.
And maybe at this point you are wondering, where did you suddenly have time for all this Finnish, Maxi? What happened to 3-D modeling, thermodynamics, and electrical drives. Are you studying all of that also, and with a puppy? No. This semester, I registered to the university as absent.
Now, you may be quite surprised by this decision. I’m really making strides in my recovery from overachieving, right? Yeah, not really. Life simply conspires to keep me on my toes.
Let’s go back in time a bit to May of 2021, if you can remember that far back. I had just gotten my admission offer from LUT. I had applied for housing and daycare and was in the midst of putting together residence permit applications when I suddenly happened upon a job posting for a fixed-term, one-year position teaching English at Aalto University. It kind of shook me.
If you remember from my blog post, Next Stop: Finland, I had looked for jobs in my field in the Nordic countries but for Finland found the following:
“What I discovered was that teachers in Finland are highly regarded, and they rarely change careers. From a pay perspective, they were somewhere in the middle in comparison to other OECD countries, but there are unions and one’s pay is based on a level system that feels transparent and more objective than what I’ve known. That all seemed very good, but it also meant that jobs were not easy to come by.”
However, here was a job posting that I 100% qualified for on LinkedIn, and all I needed to submit was a CV and cover letter. The thought was that I could move to Finland for work, and then go back to school the following year. This might be an improvement to moving directly for studies, where I’d be in a new country, with a new language, and also trying to learn a new field at the same time. There were a lot of other considerations as well, but the long and short of it was that I applied. A week after the deadline, I was invited for an interview, and only a few days later turned down for the position. But I really enjoyed the interview. I felt like these were my people. It was also a very nice rejection letter. Just a highlight of the nice part:
“However, you made an extremely positive and professional impression on the whole committee, and I sincerely hope that you consider applying for any future positions that may open up in Aalto University because you are a strong candidate who would fit in well in our English team.”
At the time, I thought the universe had spoken. I thought it was telling me, Maxi it’s your time to change your career. It’s your time to go back to school. You’re going to become an engineer. And I went along that path, as you know, for the first academic year, managing to achieve a high GPA and secure that internship. I even ended up winning a new iPad because of that GPA and my number of study credits.
But then at the end of May, I happened again to be on LinkedIn (which I actually rarely use) and saw a job positing for a “full-time, permanent” position at Aalto University, and the ground, which I imagined to be sturdy, caved. And there I was again, lost in that same debate about where I was going with my career and why. I went back to old blog posts to try to follow the threads of my thinking. What was it that I really wanted again?
In this blog about my first month of school, I wrote, “I didn’t come here for this program. I’m doing this program so I can be here.”
What if I could be in Finland with a job? What if I could be here without having to get another degree or two? I went back to the philosophical debate that Denmark’s master’s rule inspired in me a year earlier. This rule dictates that you will be considered after all other applicants for a second bachelor’s or master’s degree program unless you can prove that it is impossible to be gainfully employed in your current discipline. If I could be gainfully employed with my current education, wasn’t that what I should do?
But the philosophical debate aside, I wanted to grow my family. At this time, I was thinking about getting a puppy, and it would be more expensive to have a puppy than another child. In Finland, you get so much support when you have a child, not so when you get a dog (because they won't become tax payers in the future is my guess). And while it would be less expensive to have another child, it would cost us something. Both Bochuan and I think it would be nice if Alaya had a sibling. When were we going to work on that project? When I graduated with my second bachelor’s or master’s? Would I try having a second child while still in school? What support would I be able to get on a student residence permit for having a second child? The answer to that is a little unclear.
But all these questions, which seem to lean in the direction of applying for the position, were countered by the question of, “How would I explain if I were offered the position and took the job?” You see, in the past year, I had constructed a new narrative about who I was, what I was doing, and why I was doing it. I had stated that I had gone back to school because the environmental crisis demanded more engineers to tackle problems of how to create new products, build new buildings, and generate energy renewably. I had made a convincing case to the people who hired me for the internship that I was passionate about supporting governments around the world in transforming their energy systems so that they would meet or exceed their 2050 climate goals. Had the passion for my new path just been nice stories that I told to get whatever it was I wanted in that moment?
Did any of these questions even matter? Did it matter if I created a “coherent” narrative for my life? Did other people actually care so much about my life's narrative or personal motives? Once I realized that the questions against applying for the position were about face, or ego, or just what other people think, I knew that I would apply. So, I submitted an application.
Like last time, I was invited for an interview and teaching demonstration a week after the application deadline. However, this would occur after the summer holiday in mid-August. And, I wouldn’t ultimately receive an offer until October. This waiting to see what would happen with the job offer was why I registered as absent. It’s what gave me the time to study Finnish and start training a puppy.
I accepted the job.
Aalto University is in another city. It’s right on the western border of Helsinki. So, we will need to move. As such, things have been quite hectic since I’ve received the offer, leaving little time for Finnish, but I hope that returning to language teaching will create the environment for my Finnish to flourish.
And what about Bochuan and Alaya?
Well, as it happens, around the same time that I interviewed, Bochuan had been talking to different people from Finland’s employment agency about his career goals. They recommended that he complete a program at Keuda to learn the skill of organic farming to achieve his dream of developing a food park. With a degree from the program they suggested, he would be able to apply for EU grants that would allow him to buy the plot of land necessary to start the project. This program at Keuda is in Mäntsälä, which is north of Helsinki.
We’ll be living in Järvenpää, somewhere in the middle of where I need to go to work and where he’ll go to school. If I hadn’t been offered the job, it would have been impossible for him to complete this program. This was not a factor when I applied for the job, but it seems that the universe has chosen to shape our pathways so that where Bochuan and I want to be is still the same place.
We will move some time in December, which is when my contract is expected to start (well, assuming that all goes well with our new residence permit applications), and I’ll be teaching again in January.
There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll just share one final irony. When I first began investigating bachelor’s study programs in Finland back in October 2020, my top choice was a chemical engineering program at Aalto University. However, I was disappointed when I came to realize that I needed both SAT and SAT Math Subject Test scores to apply. I was only able to take the SAT before the application deadline. This is what lead me to LUT, which didn’t require the math subject test.
As I mentioned, beyond an interview for the job, I also had to do a teaching demonstration. Of course, my target audience for the demonstration was bachelor’s students in chemical engineering. And this isn’t just for the demonstration; I’ll be working with the chemical engineering students in the future as well.
**Photos from Zain's trip to Finland, our first snow (Nov. 6th), and other aspects of our life with a puppy
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