Eteenpäin –educational trade fair event in Lappia -talo
What is Eteenpäin –educational trade fair event? It is a chance for the educational institutes and companies to network with students, jobseekers and employees. Many schools, like universities and vocational schools, as well as employers, present their operations, values and qualification requirements. It is basically good place for someone who doesn’t know what to do in future, to look for opportunities and ask questions he/she has always wanted to ask from employers, companies and about educational institutes.
When I was personally in high school and thinking about what to do with my life after graduation, I got really interested when I heard about this event, and it really helped me to make the decision on where to apply next.
Me and Laura Ukkola went to Eteenpäin –educational trade fair event to present studying possibilities at Lapland UAS, as well as promote InnoBarentsLab on the second day. Neither one of us has previous experience of presenting at fair, so this was a challenge for us – but we were ready to face it! On my behalf, since I’m really visual oriented person I wanted to put my best effort in making the Prezi presentation as perfect as possible. And I got to say, I’m pretty happy with the result!
In the Wednesday afternoon our time came up and we were ready to start, curiously waiting how many people would show up. To our disappointment no new student came to listen the presentation, but some marketing tutors from our school came to see us, so at least we were able to do that almost as planned and got to take some photo and video material for our own use. But like in every other thing too, you should always try to look on the bright side – at least we got our very first experience at the fair stage and that’s good, because the beginning is always the hardest, right?
On the second day of the event we had InnoBarentsLab presentation prepared, and remained hopeful that we would be able to have more audience this time. Small group of vocational school students came, so we were relieved – because most likely they will now get to hear something they know nothing about beforehand.
With all the videos and interesting stories about our biggest projects seemed to really impress them, especially when we told them that all projects are run by students only and teachers are there to help us when needed but otherwise we get to practice our skills independently. Sadly they had to go before our time had finished, but we still hope that they got something out of it.
In the end, even though everything didn’t go exactly as we hoped for, this was a still a good experience for us – now we know what to do better next time!
Author: Nina Niskala
Photos: An Tran
Featured photo from: http://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/sites/default/files/imagecache/biggest/domain-90/kuvat/LAPPI-TALO.jpg