March 2015
Breaking Borders Niilo Liuhto, Fanni Haapalinna, FiMSIC Finland nisali@utu.fi
That brief moment was like a flash. We were discussing about the social program at local, regional and nationwide level in a Small Working Group at the SCORE sessions in March Meeting 2014 in Tunisia. At that moment, the NORE of Estonia and myself had an idea: why not take our respective social programs onto an international level? Our incoming students in Finland very often visit Tallinn and Stockholm as a weekend trip. Distances between these capitals and Finnish coastal cities are relatively short and ferry trips are affordable. And even though Helsinki and Tallinn are only 80 km apart and share quite similar language in the population, the architecture and history of the cities differ significantly. We had the first conversations about our event in Tunisia and arranged the first Finno-Estonian weekend last August. We gathered over 50 students, both SCORE and SCOPE, from all local committees of Finland and Estonia in our event. Fitting everything into the tight agenda was perhaps the most challenging task of the planning. Our students travelled to Helsinki where we met on Friday afternoon. We had a very brief tour on major sites of Helsinki. Afterwards, some of us had a great time
enjoying the nightlife of Helsinki. On Saturday morning, with some of us more tired than the others, we took a two-hour ferry trip to Tallinn where we met some more Estonian students who were kind hosting us there. We had a walking tour in the beautiful old town where we were able to learn a lot about the history of the city. Afterwards we just spent leisure time getting to know each other better. We indeed had a wonderful experience and the feedback we got was without a doubt positive. We really hope to collaborate more with EstMSA (Estonian Medical Students’ Association) in the future. There is still a lot to improve in our event, but we are hoping to establish it as a part of our annual social program for incoming students. By creating new social program events at an international level, we can really help participating students get the best experience possible. This can be done rather easily especially in Europe, where distances are short and the network of public transport is very extensive. As far as we know, regular international social program events like these are a rarity, if not totally absent, from the IFMSA exchange program. Given the positive feedback our event got, we would like to warmly encourage all NMOs to consider the possibility of arranging international social program together with some of their neighbouring countries.
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