Novia University of Applied Sciences

The Novia University of Applied Sciences, where we are currently studying, is located  at the Aurajoka river and only 5minutes walking distance to the city center. This makes every break between courses or lunch time very enjoyable :-) 

You can relax in the sun at the river or just walk to the "Kauppatori" and by something to eat :-)

You also have the possibility to visit the Café Novia, which is directly in the inner yard of the University. This Café is run by Novia students and they offer great food, coffee etc. - nearly everything you might be looking for for your break :-) Although they sell the products at higher prices, it is really worth it.

Nevertheless, you can also go to one of the students' canteens called "Kåren", which is on the opposite side on the University. The food there differs every day and costs around 2,60€ including main dish, salad, 2 drinks and bread. 

In order to stay or get in shape, Novia has a nice fitness room only for the students there, which you can use for free. The equipment there will not help you to become a bodybuilder, but there in my opinion there is enough stuff for a good workout :-)




But of course, studying at the Novia is not about eating or doing sports :-)
The Novia UAS is one of 4 higher educational institutions in Turku and a Swedish speaking University. The language of education is Swedish and English and most courses are held in Swedish. Nevertheless, exchange students attend English lectures with local, Finnish students. As at the Novia UAS the study style is totally different than for example at UASs in Germany, France, Spain or even here in Finland, it might be good to know how everything is handled here. First of all, you do not have professors, instead you are supervised by coaches. Then the lectures here are not given in the traditional teacher-centered way where you are sitting in a classroom and just listen to the professor. Most of the time you are working in groups and preparing projects or dealing with tasks. And there is no regular schedule. Instead you have to organize your team meetings by your own and take care that everything is done on time. The concept, called "Team Novia", focuses on team work and project-based learning combined with reading appropriate literature. The degree students here establish their own companies as teams in the beginning of their studies at Novia and they run this company until their graduation.This whole learning approach has the aim to teach the students how to handle long-term projects responsibly and team work. Of course the students do not have to run the company totally on their own. They are guided by their coaches with training sessions, workshops and courses. Those coaches have each their own team, which they supervise from the start of studies until the graduation. 

During training sessions the students have to possibility to talk about everything that is currently going on within the course and their company. Every session is lead by one or two students who prepare and moderate it. It usually takes place in one of the typical Novia rooms with sofas or IKEA arm chairs and the students are sitting in a big circle. The tourism students also have their own "offices", where they can hold up meetings and discuss different issues.

I am currently attending the course "Sustainable Development". We had to choose a town in Finland and take a look at the town's plans of how it would like to develop until 2050. I am part of the group, which has chosen Tampere and firstly we started with the creation of a project plan in order to organize our tasks, aims and due dates. As we knew from the beginning on that we have to prepare a presentation until the mid of April, we were able to plan the whole project subsequently. Novia is always looking for students doing a theoretical and an empirical part within projects and so we took the chance to travel to Tampere and speak to some respondents regarding the plans for "Tampere in 2050". For me, this was a perfect opportunity - I did not only get to know new finish students and employees of the city Tampere, I also had the chance to see Tampere and get an exclusive guided tour through the city from locals :-)
Now we have to work with the information we got from our interviews, prepare a presentation about "Tampere in 2050" and write a group report in which we discuss what we have learned and what went well and what went bad within the project. Next to this group part we have to write an individual so called "Key learning note". Here we combine knowledge from the literature with the course experiences we have made. This document describes the students learning progress and the knowledge the student has gained through literature study, the active team work and the training sessions. In order to guarantee that every student is working actively in the course we have to write down every hour we work for the project including the date and what we worked on. 
This might seem a lot of paper work, but you should not forget that there is no final written exam at the end of the course. This is the same in all the other courses, except Financing and Investment. You surely will not get bored as you always have to do something for the different courses, but still it is fun! At least more fun than writing exams :-) You have the chance to become part of the course as you work together with different people and you participate more actively in the lectures than you might be used to from at home. I really like it as there is not the pressure I was used to from my home university regarding tests and exams. Also the fact that there are usually no "lectures" you can arrange your team meetings individually whenever you have time for it. You just have to get everything done on time, but this is no problem at all.
I hope you now have an idea how the study life at Novia University in Turku is and to receive some more information about the projects here stay tuned and check out next week's post :-)
If you are interested in their learning concept, check out Team Novias webpage!



See you soon and enjoy everything!

Katharina