My name is Saimi Hartikainen and I am a first-year student at United World College Maastricht, which is an international boarding school in the Netherlands. I come from Finland, and I am very excited to be here to broaden my horizons and understand new perspectives.
I grew up in an environment where I was encouraged and pushed to explore the world around me and to be curious and eager to learn. I have been lucky enough to be able to travel quite a bit with my family, and about that, I can say that seeing new places, meeting new people, and getting to know new cultures rarely gave me the satisfaction of having seen it all; on the contrary, these things have made me understand how little I actually know about the world and how much I want to see and learn more. This was even more amplified by my early upbringing in a French kindergarten in Helsinki, where I learned the language and grew up surrounded by different cultures. As my upbringing has encouraged me to embrace curiosity, I have tried to live my life so far by immersing myself in new experiences.
This I have been doing through my hobbies and educational path. I have been a scout for 10 years now, which has truly contributed to my personal growth and perspective on life; as a scout, I see things such as reliability, personal development, environmentalism, and intercultural friendships as a great virtue and something to strive for in life. Another dear hobby of mine has been reading for as long as I can remember. I have always enjoyed immersing myself in a story of a book, and especially during the pandemic reading has made me realize that in order to discover new perspectives, you don’t have to be able to leave your house. With a book, you can travel far, just by staying on your sofa, because with some imagination and compassion you can almost live in the story.
I also enjoy sports. I have never been very competitive in that field, but I take the opportunity to do sports as a chance to challenge myself and let out all the frustration and negative feelings that we sometimes store in ourselves. My favorite sports include tennis, skiing, horseback riding, running, going to the gym, and hiking. Especially hiking is something that I really enjoy, as it is a big part of the scout activities in Finland. Therefore I am also doing the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award this spring at school, as it is a great way to challenge myself, bond with my classmates, and enjoy nature after our exams.
Academically I have always been ready to challenge myself. In secondary school, I went to a further science class for my three years there, which was truly an eye-opening experience. Only a third of the students in the class were girls, and there was quite a lot of tension between the boys and the girls in the class. This gave me an idea already at a very young age of how women experience negative interactions even in professional environments, and since then I have been interested in changing this. I also engaged in several exchange programs, for example hosting French, German, and Portuguese students at my family’s house and then spending a week in Portugal with an exchange family through the Erasmus+ Solar system via the Geogebra program. In my last year of secondary school, I was the student body president, which taught me a lot about responsibility and leadership.
Inspired by these and many other experiences, I applied to United World College, and ended up here, in Maastricht. The past months here have been unique and taught me so much, not only in classrooms but also from my peers with whom I often engage in insightful discussions. Even everyday activities can teach you something new at UWC, as we all come from different cultures and backgrounds. In addition to this, many of the extracurricular activities of the school have offered a multidimensional perspective on change-making and global issues. For example, I am a part of the Anti-racism and Diversity Youth Social Entrepreneurship group, in which we are planning a film festival to engage the local community in discussions on themes such as racism, white fragility, and inequality through filmmaking. I am also a member of the International Peace Conference at our school, which aims to spark conversations on the concept of peace on different levels at school, in the local community, and more globally by engaging students in workshops and inviting speakers who are experts in the field. These opportunities have given me the chance to learn about cooperation, communication, and one’s responsibility in the community.
I am very excited to work with FIN, as I find the mission very interesting and important. It is definitely the kind of change-making initiative that we need in the modern world, and I am looking forward to participating in the various activities and tasks. In the future, I hope to study international relations and then further participate in change-making on a global level through diplomacy. This internship will surely provide me with useful and unique tools that I can use later in life and in my career, which makes me very grateful to have this opportunity.