I Am Back: Now in Finland

 

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.”

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.