Some things that living in Finland taught me 

22.5.2025 0 Like 0 kommenttia

Giorgia Lolli, MA Choreography student at Uniarts Helsinki, reflects on her three years of living in Finland and the unexpected lessons learned beyond the classroom – from navigating student life to embracing Finnish winter.

The end of the year is always a good time to celebrate and cherish the achievement of the year that has passed and set new goals for what’s to come. This year I look back to my first second and final year of studies at Uniarts, in the MA Choreography program. Also, the third year calling Finland my home base. Surely, I look back to all the courses, the encounters with my classmates and other artists, visiting the guest performances in Moving in November Festival and Zodiak’s Side Step Festival, Nordic Choreographic platform mobility studies in Copenhagen and Oslo… but I also can’t help but notice everything that I learned indirectly.

This blog post lists things that I notice life in Finland has taught me. With it, I celebrate all the collaterals. All the added value to the experience of moving to Helsinki for university studies and encountering other cultures. Let’s start big with…

Being a student

In Finland, I felt welcomed by a context where being a student is a status in society. That comes with discounted lunch, discounted public transport in the city and on trains, and publicly subsidized healthcare – to point out a few. As a student coming from another European country, studying in Finland is free of tuition. Even if it was scary at first to think about doing the leap – and commit to a full-time two year long Master’s degree – I have been quite surprised by how many places offer students discounts. I am not writing this to say life in Helsinki is cheap – not at all, it is not. However, I am approaching my studies with the idea that education is a right, and that Finland has an embedded culture and social security system that could support you  while you embrace the responsibilities of being a student.

Money talks

I have noticed Finns have a very transparent relationship to this topic. If normalising talking about salary is important to everyone, it becomes even more central in the Arts, when collaborators are often friends and the lines between work and life tend to get blurred. In Finland, these discussions are approached with a vivid honesty: “I do not have hours for this in my part-time” or “these task is paid XX euros/h” are lines of everyday use. This has helped me rethink my relationship with salary-making, helping me normalize discussing the value of my work or the time in which the payment will come in. Moreover: work contracts have been quite simple to read, opening a bank account has been an easy process, and the basic selection of documents from authorities are accessible in English – all things that help with the burden bureaucracy can be.

Valuing time outdoors

Being born in the city, in a quite densely populated area of Italy, I have always been an “indoor cat”. As I experienced my first full winter in Finland, and the long months of darkness, I have come to appreciate the warmer days, of course, but also the snow and the refreshing wind that we have in Helsinki. The area around the city is full of beautiful forests to enjoy anything between a 5 minutes parth walk or a longer Sunday excursion. Seeing how my Finnish friends value their time in nature is teaching me how to cherish these moments. I still think being on the couch with a nice cup of tea is relaxing enough, but I have become more adventurous. I had my first quick after-sauna dip in the frozen sea last winter and I am planning to visit a Mökki (Finnish summer cottage) with friends when the weather will get warmer.

Scheduling and thinking long term

As an artist who has been working in the freelance field, shifting from managing my own schedule to coming back to the University courses frame wasn’t an easy shift. In my program, however, we got right away the syllabus and schedule for the whole year. Knowing what my plans and goals were made me relax quite a bit. Setting my base in Helsinki and knowing the frame of my next two years have been a momentary relief from the precarity of this freelance-artist lifestyle. In Finland, foundations who grant artists are often asking to provide work plans for 6-months at least. During my time at Uniarts, I have trained this competence. I feel my mental frameworks have shifted towards longer terms: my job is still structured project to project, but I feel more connected to a broader horizon of time – where projects are in dialogue and where I can think of my practice in a longer, more sustainable, frame.

If you are abroad and thinking of applying to a program at Helsinki Uniarts, my best recommendation is to give the applications your best shot. Overtime, vitamin D supplements,  a good jacket, a villapaita and removable spikes make the Winter time a lot less scary and can prepare you for what’s to learn!

Writer

Giorgia Lolli
MA Choreography student