University of Applied Science

University of Applied Science - TUAS

My host institution is the university of Applied Science (TUAS) in Turku where I am studding Social Services. The name in Finnish is "Turun ammattikorkeakoulu". Back home I am studying Teaching Education. There are no courses for Teaching Education at TUAS. I felt lucky because I got a practical training place at a middle school in Turku. The organization and the information I got from my host university were bad. On the first and second January there were two orientation days which I attended. After these two days I haven’t got any courses till the end of January. To get this information I had to write a lot of e-mails with different teachers, supervisors and coordinators. It seemed that nobody knows when the courses will start for exchange students. Finish students got the information about their courses very late as well. For me it was completely complicated, and I was used to get information about courses at least one month in advance.

There is an App designed by TUAS which is called "TUUDO". You will hear this name a lot from all the teachers. All the teachers would say you can find everything on TUUDO. For me it was not that necessary to use it. One big benefit of this App is that you can find a map with all the rooms for studying and this makes it much easier to find everything.

In addition, I had a lot of online courses which was great because I could manage by myself when I want to do something for it. On the other hand, it was very hard to meet any new people at university. I had just two classes which I had to attend; the Finnish course and Community work. This course was a course from the social services degree. So, this was totally not my field and I didn't had any knowledge about social services which makes it difficult to follow the classes.