I Am Back ! Finland Edition

 

Hello everyone, I am back!

As you know (if you have followed my blog since the beginning), I created this blog to help improve my English and, moreover, to help other people like me who cannot pay for expensive courses and materials. Here I share daily all my studies and tips on where you can find excellent free materials to improve your English. However, I declared this website “closed” when I finally achieved my goal of pursuing a PhD abroad.

Now I have been living in Helsinki, Finland, for almost a year, studying and working at the University of Helsinki. This new experience has been challenging but, at the same time, gratifying. I have been learning so much in a short time. All the people around me, my new colleagues and friends, are helping me feel more comfortable every day. I think I have been adapting very well and quickly.

Currently, I am working very hard on my experiments, to be honest, I don’t have much time to stop and dedicate myself more deeply to my English studies. You may say: ok, but everything around you is in English. More or less, people around me are generally speaking Finnish, so improving my listening is a little difficult. Obviously, I have been improving my communication through lab meetings, journal clubs, speaking with friends, and discussing my project with my supervisors helps me a lot.

Nevertheless, I want to improve faster, so this year I decided to go back to my studies in a different way, obviously, because I must reconcile them with my PhD studies and experiments in the lab. Hence, I enrolled in an English course offered by my university. It is not a traditional course, it is Autonomous Learning Modules – ALMS (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/alms-helsinki/what-is-alms/). “The keystones of autonomous learning are reflection and self-evaluation. This includes planning, considering and setting goals, making decisions about methodology, working in authentic situations and, finally, continuously evaluating the learning process and progress.” In short, it is the same self-learning I did so far, but with professional support. 😊 

I had been thinking about coming back to my blog, but unfortunately, I kept putting it off. This time, the course pushed me to finally return, and I feel so happy about that. Then, I declare this blog open again, and in the next post I will explain what I will cover in my new posts.