Looking Back at Two Years in Finland
I never really wanted to study abroad. I am originally from Trento, a relatively small Italian city right in the middle of the Dolomites. We travelled a lot with my family, for which I’m very grateful, and saw many interesting places and cultures especially in Europe. Despite this, I never saw the appeal of moving away for longer. After deciding to study computer science, I didn’t really consider leaving. The University of Trento was, and still is, consistently ranked among the best in Italy, especially for computer science, so I was happy to stay here, without really questioning any alternative. To be fair, it did work out: the education I received was indeed great (particularly thanks to some professors, like my BSc Thesis supervisor, Alberto Montresor and Elisa Ricci, whose course first introduced me to Machine Learning, and got me interested in Reinforcement Learning), and I met great people along the way, some of whom I am still in touch with today.
However, during those three years, something started to change. For starters, COVID hit, and I spent the latter half of my first year and most of my second year in lockdown, learning from home. During that time, I started to realize something: besides courses and exams, the real value of university is the people you meet, the ideas you can exchange, and how this can shape your own growth and interests. While I was lucky enough to have some great friends, they were all similar to me: they came from around the same area, had similar backgrounds, and were interested in similar things. After coming back from lockdown, I began to make my mind up, and decided to challenge myself by going abroad for my Master’s degree.
Why Finland?
Some friends introduced me to the EIT Digital Master’s School, a program that allows you to study in two different universities across Europe, and I was intrigued. Trento was one of the universities participating, so it felt like an opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone while still maintaining a connection to home. I wanted to focus on Machine Learning (even if I now realize how vague that actually is), so I started looking at EIT’s Data Science program, and figuring out which universities I could go to. Some of my favorite trips with my family had been to the Nordics; we had done a tour of Scandinavia and seen Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and another time had visited Finland, starting a road trip in Helsinki and going all the way up to Cape North with my best friend and his dad. I always felt like I would have fit in well; in Trento, we are known for being a bit more reserved and introverted, which definitely applies for me as well, and I feel like the stereotype is similar specifically for Finland, both with and without merit. Thus, out of all the options available, perhaps it is not surprising that Aalto University in Helsinki was the one that caught my attention, as well as KTH in Stockholm. At this point, I abandoned the idea of doing one year in Trento, and instead thought I would apply for a first year in Aalto and second year in KTH through the EIT (it also helped that another friend was thinking of doing the same).
Ultimately, after a closer look at the study curriculum when I was applying, I realized that the EIT Master’s School was not the best fit for me. The program is designed to be focused on entrepreneurship and innovation, including 30 mandatory ECTS, a fourth of the total, in business and startup-related courses. While it was (and still is) a great opportunity, my passion was always for learning and discovering new things instead of selling them (which perhaps should have been a hint that I would end up in research, even if at the time I didn’t really consider it), so I ended up looking elsewhere. I still had Aalto and KTH in the back of my mind, and Aalto specifically had what looked like a great program in Machine Learning, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, so I applied directly to that, deciding to go all in and stay two years in Finland.
In retrospect, this was a pretty bold choice, and one I wouldn’t recommend now, or at least not in the same way I did. With hindsight, the choice for a Master’s program (especially with the intention of going into research) should be informed by the research groups and professors you want to work with, rather than the courses you are going to take. This is an important lesson I have learned so far in my still young career: to a certain extent, any good university can teach you what you need, and the quality of a course can vary greatly depending on the professor teaching it, which is hard to evaluate beforehand. What really matters about a study program is the people you will know and get to work with, because while good research can happen anywhere, it happens best when you are surrounded by people who share your interests and passions, and who can help you grow. In fairness to myself, I still had very undefined interests and would not have been able to know which professor or lab would have been a good fit for me, and it’s probably also true that my current research focus evolved just as much as a function of where I was, and likely would have been very different had I gone down a different path and met different people. All of this is to say that, while I probably should have stopped and looked at other universities across Europe, choosing Aalto and Helsinki thankfully did not end up being a mistake, but instead resulted in what have been the two most important years of my life, at least so far.
Moving to Helsinki
As I’ve briefly mentioned, I was never, and still really am not, a very extroverted person, and I distinctly remember that not being able to meet people and being alone in a foreign country was the biggest fear I had about moving away, as I didn’t typically have the confidence to go out and meet someone new. Thankfully, I was at least going with the aforementioned friend who did end up choosing the EIT Master’s School (which also allowed me to still have a look at what they were learning, even without being directly involved with WIT), so at least for the first year I had a roommate I already knew. We arrived in Helsinki around three years ago, towards the end of August 2022, and after a couple days in a hotel we moved in to Atlantinkatu 7B 74, a student apartment in Jätkäsaari. The neighborhood was quite a contrast to where I was coming from: it was recently repurposed from being the city’s harbor and is currently undergoing a massive construction process, with modern buildings surrounding the Hyväntoivonpuisto (the Park of Good Hope), and with large areas still barren and waiting for development to start. The beginning was a bit of a shock, especially as we had to go buy everything we needed (furniture included, which is quite unusual in Italy), but thanks to a massive IKEA trip, we managed to set everything up.
In those same days, we also visited Aalto for the first time, and I remember being immediately impressed by how modern and vibrant it felt. The campus is in Otaniemi, Espoo, and it fundamentally spans a whole peninsula, feeling like a small city in itself, with its own metro station and shopping center. We had come to Finland a bit early on purpose, so we could attend the orientation week and get to know the university and other students. Looking back, it was this week that led me to meet most of the close friends I made in Finland, with whom I still talk regularly. Thanks to this, my fears of not being able to meet people quickly went away, and instead I found myself with an international group of friends, with people from Italy, Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Finland, Romania, Russia, Vietnam and more, all sharing the same experience. As it turns out, this is precisely what I was looking for, and the two years we spent together really helped me to grow as a person, and to learn about different perspectives. It was never about the courses, but always about the people, and I was lucky enough to meet some great ones. Some highlights were the two Junction we participated in (some would say we had ALot of fun), grilling some sausages seaside at Saukonpaaden puisto in Jätkäsaari, studying together in the business building (don’t tell anyone!), going to the sauna together, watching movies in the Aalto cinema (I said don’t tell anyone!), but especially the trips we did together, going to visit each other’s homes and families, first to Tenerife, then skiiing in Trento, and later this year hiking in Romania. More than anything else, this is what I will truly remember about my time in Finland.
Discovering Research
I spent my first year taking courses and learning as much I could about all fields of Machine Learning, from Aalto’s specialty of Bayesian and Probabilistic methods, to Deep Learning (thanks to Alexander Ilin’s excellent course) and Reinforcement Learning, which had caught my eye during my Bachelor’s. All along the way, I never really questioned what path I was on and why I was even doing it, but really enjoyed the process and was always excited when hearing about some new method or algorithm. Again, perhaps this should have been a hint that I would end up in research, but at the time I was still very much focused on the courses and exams, and didn’t really think about the future. Some friends, specifically Sergio, who would become my new roommate in the second year, were already set on pursuing a PhD and specifically started the Master’s with that in mind, and I remember admiring his determination and even slightly envying that he already had a clear goal in mind. When the year ended, many of my friends chose to stay in Finland for the summer to work as research assistants in various groups, while I decided to go back home to Trento and spend some time with my family. In hindsight, this is an opportunity I missed, as I could have started to get involved in research earlier and spent time in Finland during the summer, which I later found to be one of the best periods of the year in Helsinki.
It took until my second year to start taking research more seriously, and even then I mostly stumbled into it. This is a story I will tell in more detail in a future post, but through a series of coincidences I got to know Nicola, a PhD student at Aalto. We did a research project together during the Fall, as this was a mandatory requirement for the Master’s program, and found we had a lot of shared interests. After this, I was looking for someone to supervise my Master’s thesis, and as Nicola had also just finished his previous article and had liked working with me, so he offered to be the advisor for my Thesis, which would be supervised by his PhD supervisor, professor Pekka Marttinen. I had already taken some courses with Pekka, including the Seminar on Large Language Models (perhaps the most influential course I took at Aalto all-together), so I thought it would be a good fit. While most of my friends worked on their Thesis alone, only meeting with their advisors every now and then, I ended up working with Nicola almost on a daily basis, and fundamentally became a sort of unofficial research assistant. From the start, the process was never just about my Thesis, but rather about writing an article with the goal of publishing to the biggest Machine Learning conference, NeurIPS, which we ended up doing. I would say this is what really shaped me and finally made me realize that I enjoyed the process of research (perhaps also aided by the fact we got the paper accepted), and I felt like that same drive I had to learn for learning’s sake could now be expressed through a clear career path.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
In the end, after completing my studies in August 2024, I needed to choose if I was going to stay in Finland or go back to Italy. I ended up going back to be closer to my family at a time when that was needed, and finding a job at FBK, a leading Italian research institute in Trento, where I still currently work at the time of writing. I still collaborate with Nicola, Pekka and Aalto, with whom we’ve published a preprint in May, and I’m now in the process of understanding what my future looks like, likely involving a PhD, even if I’m not sure where yet. I find it’s still too early to look back and understand if leaving Finland was the right choice, but I can definitely say going there was. My years at Aalto gave me a great group of friends, an idea for what my carreer could look like, and helped me grow from a shy and reserved person to someone who is much more confident in himself and his abilities, without losing sight of my values. Even if I don’t know if my path will take me back to Helsinki, I can confidently say that it will always feel like a second home, and I still feel like I belong there.
I know that perhaps this whole post is just for me to look back and be nostalgic, but I hope that it might also be useful for someone else who is thinking about studying abroad, or even just moving to a new place. If you are considering it, just go for it, as it will likely be one of the most important experiences of your life. It will help you grow, and you will meet people who will shape your future in ways you cannot even imagine. However, also take it slow, consider your options and make an informed choice, not an impulsive one; this might be obvious, but it’s not always easy advice to follow. Choose a place that feels right for you, pay attention to the research groups and professors you want to work with, imagine yourself living there and think if you can see yourself being happy. And if that choice happens to be Helsinki, I can only recommend it. I promise the weather is great in the summer and the winters have their charm, the snow is beautiful, and while the people might indeed be a bit reserved, they are also very welcoming and friendly, especially if you give them a few beers first.
Kiitos!
