Bye St. John's

There is a lot I should write about, so I decided to split my last topics into two posts. This post is about St. John's and school, and the next will be about my little trip to Florida and going back to Finland + some reflection on the exchange semester. In a nutshell, this post is what a Finnish person coming to study in St. John's would most likely want to know before applying.

St. John's and MUN overview

St. John's is a historic and distinctive city in the island of Newfoundland. The population is a little over 100 000, which makes St. John's a really good sized city for my taste. There are lots of hills and colorful houses around the city, that is located on the coast. There is a lot to see and do, especially since the nature is very different from Finland. And the weather could be summarized into two words: windy and unpredictable. It's a bit warmer than Finland, but the weather also changes very quickly. Sometimes it's cold, sometimes it's warm, but usually it's windy and rainy (in Fall). What makes the city different from most Finnish cities (same seems to apply to a lot of North American cities in my experience), is that a lot more people seem to be living in their own houses instead of apartments. Students that don't want to live in on-campus residence often share a house, instead of getting their own apartment or sharing an apartment. There are buses going around the town fairly frequently, so going to a mall for example is easy. Cabs aren't that expensive either, usually sharing a cab between residence and downtown (~3km) costs you just a few dollars.

The university (MUN) is larger than e.g. LUT, and includes multiple disciplines anywhere from music to engineering. Buildings are fairly old, and they are spread apart based on disciplines in a small area. There is a tunnel system connecting most of the buildings, if you don't feel like walking outdoors. I've covered most of the differences between Finnish/LUT and MUN university systems in my previous posts, so I won't go in depth here.

One major difference compared to Finland is that accommodation is effectively guaranteed. If you apply for on-campus residence, you will either get a room in a shared apartment, a single room in dorm style housing or a double-room. Naturally you can also look for your own place in the private market, which is often less expensive. But based on my own experience, I would definitely recommend applying for dormitory style housing in Paton College. It's very easy to get to know to and spend time with people while living in a dorm, since everybody uses the same public spaces, bathrooms and dining hall (that's also used by people from other houses). Also there are lots of events organized for the people living in on-campus residence and people from your house. And for an exchange period it is very convenient and easy, although expensive. Again, I've discussed accommodation in my earlier posts, so I'm keeping it brief here.

Course overviews

I completed four courses while in MUN. A brief summary of each summary below.

ENGL 1020 Writing for Second Language Students consisted of two lessons per week, two quizzes, three writing assignments and a final (an essay). Lessons and quizzes were mostly about grammar and academic text theory. Writing assignments were a summary and two synthesis texts, that you had to revise once or twice after the first draft. The final was just a synthesis that you'd write in class. Overall the course was well organized and instructed, but to be honest, also quite useless if you already have academic writing experience. I learned a few grammatical details and improved as a writer, but that's about it. I wouldn't recommend this course for an exchange student, unless you're feeling unsure about your writing skills, because you would already know almost everything covered in the course.

ENGI 3941 Production Technology had lectures twice a week, a lab session once a week as well as assignments, projects and a final exam. Lectures were good and informational, and in lab sessions you got to make your own air motor, which gives a student a more practical view of some manufacturing methods. Weekly assignments were quizzes about the most current topics, and they consisted of mostly multiple choice questions and a few calculations. Projects were done in groups, and in the first one you had to design a 3D printable object and a quick return mechanism that were later printed/laser cut. In the second one you had to reverse engineer and model an object in SolidWorks, and the third one was a research project about modern production technologies. The final exam consisted solely of open field questions, and there were roughly 50 of them. There was a huge amount of material (~1500 PDF slides and/or a book) to be studied for the exam, and if you wanted a good grade, you'd actually have to study essentially all of it. I had good enough grades from assignments and projects, so I didn't study too hard for the final. This course had a lot of useful information for a (mechanical) engineer and interesting labs, but it also required the most work out of all my courses.

ENGI 9614 Renewable Energy and Resource Conservation had two lectures per week, assignments, an individual project, a midterm exam and a final exam. Lectures were sometimes not concentrated on essential subjects on the course, which made them annoying to attend. Assignments were helpful, either calculations or summaries about course topics. You could choose your own topic for the project, and the topics were usually either case studies or research projects, and you did have to do a short presentation on the subject. Midterm and final were pretty basic, theory questions and calculations. The theory and general topics of this course were fine (see course name), but some of the topics were completely irrelevant and some were way too detailed for an introductory course. Communication between the teacher and students was also an issue if you missed lectures, since the teacher didn't always post important information to the online study platform.

ENGI 9627 Environmental Systems Engineering consisted of weekly lectures, a midterm exam, assignments and a project. The main topic of this course was basically different optimization methods for system/operation design, and not necessarily systems engineering as a whole. Lectures were useful, but sometimes hard to follow. Couple of the assignments were calculation based question collections, and one was a critical review of an article. Midterm exam consisted only of calculations, and essentially included everything taught in the course apart from the last couple lectures. Project was a research or case study term paper, that included a presentation. This was done in pairs, and you could choose your own topic. For me the contents of this course will be useful in the future (at least hopefully). Again, one of the main issues of this course was the communication between students and the teacher. If you missed a lecture (like I did a few times), you would miss a lot of important stuff. For example, that there's an assignment due next week, which I learned when there were ~24h left to do it (originally there was a week), because the teacher didn't announce the assignment anywhere but the lecture that I had missed. This meant having to cram up a whole lot of calculations in a short period of time, based on incomplete material. This was the second major issue, the teacher didn't upload any of the calculation examples online, which meant that you had to be in the lecture, get the example notes from someone else or take a picture of the teacher's notebook during the next lecture. In terms of the aforementioned assignment, this meant that I had to do a lot of calculations that were based on the lecture examples that were not available anywhere on such short notice (Google is a friend though, even if relevant examples were really hard to find since the subject was quite complex). I did ask later if the teacher could upload the lecture examples online, but the answer was no since apparently it's "not fair for the people that attended all the lectures". Apart from these issues, the course is still useful for someone in my field.



A second post is coming up whenever I'm finished writing it. Could be a day or two weeks.

-Aapo

Had a little snowball fight when the snow finally stayed on the ground longer than a couple of hours.

"Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex" -Albert Einstein. Always wondered why these (the one on the left) had to be so unnecessarily complex (compare to the one on the right).

Bye CU-311. A typical double-room in dorms. At first I had a roommate here, but most of the time I had the whole room to myself.

The end is near

I'm on my last couple of weeks here in St. John's, and apart from three final exams, I'm already done with school as well. I definitely could've stayed longer here, but I guess I should graduate at some point. After all, I just have to write my Master's thesis to graduate. It's been a great experience so far, and I'm definitely happy I ended up coming here.

These past few weeks (apart from school) I've continued enjoying the student life, including e.g. watching an ECHL hockey game, 12 Barz of Christmas and a quick swim in a nearby pond (maybe ~3 degrees?). The last one wasn't even my idea even though it's pretty normal in Finland, and I'm proud of the boys coming up with such a neat experience. There was no sauna though, which was a disappointment. What I'm also proud of is the good old sissitonnikala (tuna for you Americans) catching on, and now even some people from other houses are cooking that. And just to be clear, I have not suggested once making tuna (only mentioned it once), but rather people just started making that on their own.

Upcoming final exams

For the last few weeks in school I've mostly worked on several projects. One of them included some SolidWorks modeling and another some optimization calculations, but otherwise they've mostly been research/case projects. The big thing coming up now is the final exams. Happily I've already passed 3/4 of my courses without taking a single final yet, so my stress levels aren't nearly as high as some people's. The one final I actually need to take to pass the course would require maybe 20-30%, so shouldn't be too hard.

What's different about finals and midterms here compared to Finland is the exam system. Back home you can sign up 3 (?) times for the same exam, so you're not as likely to fail. And you can choose when to take that exam, because there are lot of exam dates available for the same course and the professors/teachers don't need to invigilate the exam sessions (unlike here). Want to go home for Christmas earlier? Take the exam after Christmas or in March if that's better for you. Here there seems to be one chance, and you can't even affect when that is. Some people might have multiple exams on same day or e.g. 4 exams in 3 days, which makes the pressure even worse: you can't reschedule, and you don't have another opportunity to take the exam in case it doesn't go well. Needless to say, I prefer the Finnish system.



I will write at least one post later, where I'll reflect more on the stay here. I'll also include a condensed review/descriptions of each of my courses as well as an overview of Fall schedule and need-to-know basics here at MUN for possible future exchange students reading this. As usual, a few pictures will follow this post.

-Aapo

Newfoundland Growlers vs. Atlanta Gladiators (ECHL)

Quidi Vidi harbor

Quidi Vidi village

Europe is that way

Ford vs. Ferrari. D-Box (surround sounds, moving seats) was pretty fun especially for a driving movie.

First snowfall in St. John's. Unfortunately it melted away almost immediately.

Midterms

It's been a while since my last post. Weather in St. John's is still a mystery: one day it's 3 degrees, wind blowing 10 m/s and raining, and the next day it's sunny, calm and 15 degrees. I still sort of prefer this to Finnish fall, because at least it's not raining sleet (yet) and there's no slosh. I've had a couple of midterms in the past two weeks, so I'll be discussing them in the context of the courses in this text. This is going to be a shorter post, since I do not have anything too special to write about.

Midterm on ENGI9614 Renewable Energy and Resource Conservation was a traditional exam you'd see in most engineering courses in Finland as well. There were theory questions and some calculations. The test was two hours, and nobody left the class room before the time ran out, so there was probably too many questions. The questions themselves were alright, although not very consistent in terms of complexity. E.g. one question might be about differences of energy efficiency and energy conservation (which could be deduced from the terms themselves) and the next about pressure composition isotherm curves of solid hydrogen storage material. And keep in mind, this is an introductory course to renewable energy, and even though I've studied energy technology for four years I had never heard about solid materials for hydrogen storage before this course. So I'd consider that quite advanced (which is fine for me) and not very relevant for an introductory course, but since solid hydrogen storage was also the teacher's PhD thesis subject I get why she would include it. There were also fill a blank questions, which can be quite infuriating, because if you didn't answer using the same word(s) as in the lecture slides it would be marked as false (even though the answer might be technically correct). But overall the test was OK, and not too hard.

Midterm on ENGI9627 Environmental Systems Engineering consisted of 8 calculation questions / optimization problems. Again, nobody left the class before the three hour time limit (I had time to finish 6/8 questions). The subject of the course is pretty hard to explain, so an example is probably the easiest way to describe it. E.g. if you had two kinds of oils (domestic and foreign) with different properties and you had to mix them to create certain amounts of premium and regular fuels, how much of each oil would you use for each fuel mix? And then there might be a table of oil properties and required fuel properties, prices of each oil and fuel, etc. Objective might be to maximize the profit while satisfying the requirements, and you would do that by using different algorithms or methods. I find this actually a useful skill to have, and fortunately there're computer programs (e.g. Excel add-ins) that allow you to do this. So I might just actually apply this knowledge sometime in the future. Questions of this midterm were alright and something I had expected, but the time limit was just very brutal.

Other than midterms and school stuff, there's been fun events such as Halloween (that people actually celebrate here), Mardi Gras (basically a Halloween festival) and Beerlympics (you figure it out). There are also intramurals (student sport games against each other), and I'm playing football (soccer) and volleyball. It's a nice way to do something healthy every once in a while. Also, couple of pictures below.

-Aapo

Air motor. Each of us made one of these in a lab (in a course called Production Technology), which was pretty interesting. All parts were milled/turned/drilled/tapped. This thing can do about 2500RPM on pressurized air, which is a respectable amount. It works by blowing air to the cylinder in the back, and the air drives a piston (attached to a crankshaft) like in a traditional internal combustion engine. There're intake and exhaust "valves" in the flat plate (holes on both sides, they run to the backside of the flat plate), and the valves "open" based on the position of the cylinder (not the piston!).

I told one of the guys how people like to eat canned tuna in the Finnish army. Couple of days later he comes to my door with these beauties. Dining hall is alright, but there aren't many things that can beat proper sissitonnikala.

New York City

Thanksgiving in Canada took place on the 14th of October this year, so 14th and 15th were days off from classes. These were the only days I knew beforehand I could take off, so I had planned a trip to New York City for 11th - 15th of October already in July. Other than that, midterm exams were coming up for most people in the last couple of weeks, but my first midterm isn't until tomorrow. So I guess the best thing to do the night before is to write a blog post, right?

Big Apple

I arrived to NYC just before midnight on Friday, and was at my hotel around 1 AM. In the next following 4 days I got acquainted with local Subway system (which worked great by the way), walked roughly 15 km per day on average and tried to do and see as much as possible. I'll just add pictures and captions at the end of this post, and point out a few things that I found worth noting.

1. Street performers were (at least for me) a hidden gem in a city, that has so many other attractions to offer. I've come across these kinds of performances in bigger cities before, but the variety and skill of those individuals or groups is still amazing. I found that just walking through parks was definitely a great way to spend some time, while watching those people do their thing.
2. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but NYC is really expensive. My hotel was one of the cheaper ones, and let's just say that there weren't any children or families around (and I can understand why). Compared to other cities you can see the difference: before I came to St. John's in August I stayed in Toronto for a few days, and the hotel there was roughly the same price but much, much better. For the same kind of room that I had in Toronto, I would have probably had to pay 2x the money in NYC. Tourist attractions are very expensive as well, and luckily I managed to steer away from most of them. When you add tipping, donating to street performers etc, eating and all that, I found myself using ATMs alarmingly often (credit cards were not very reliable). I haven't dared to check out my bank account balance yet.
3. Public transport just works. All I had to do was get a MetroCard, and I could travel all around Manhattan, Brooklyn and much more without even thinking about taxis, buses or city-bikes. Only when I went across the river to NJ, I had to get separate train tickets.
4. NHL stadiums (at least the ones I went to) were surprisingly quiet. On average I'd say a regular SaiPa game is louder than a regular NYR/NJD game, even though the attendance in both games was probably 15 000 - 20 000 compared to SaiPa's average 3000 - 4000. And I'm not even exaggerating. So I guess "Tunnelma kuin SaiPan pelissä" is a valid praise after all. The level of play on the other hand is significantly higher: it's no wonder that NHL players make millions while Liiga players make a few hundred thousand per season at most. The NFL game I went to was great in terms of atmosphere, but to be fair, the attendance was about 78 500 so you'd expect a bit more noise.
5. Homeless people were extremely friendly and polite, which is something that I rarely hear mentioned. Not a single (homeless) person tried to press me to donate or insult me or anything like that. Even if I didn't give anything, everyone wished me God's blessings or "Have a nice day". I know my sample size is very small, but I've come across much more aggressive beggars in much shorter time spans in other cities.
6. On my way back to St. John's, I was supposed to fly via Toronto, just as I did when flying to NYC. However, my flight to Toronto was delayed so that I would've missed my connection to St. John's (which was also the last flight that day). I went to speak with Air Canada customer service officials, and no more than 10 minutes later I was physically sitting in a plane going to Montreal, from where I flew back to St. John's. I'm still amazed how easily and quickly the issue got sorted out, especially when considering some of the policies by other airlines (did someone say United?).

While I was supposed to be preparing for my midterms I've started planning what to do after the final exams, before coming back to Finland. I can't make any too detailed plans until I know my final exam schedule, but I booked flights from Orlando (Florida) to Helsinki on 20th - 21st of December, so at least I'll be home for Christmas.

-Aapo

Manhattan was pretty impressive from a plane at night.

Hudson river, Statue of Liberty, part of New Jersey (pictures from One World Trade Center, tallest building  in the wolrd outside of Asia)

New Jersey

Manhattan

Downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn (across the river)

Other WTC towers.

WTC memorial.

Central Park. The contrast to surrounding infrastructure is quite noticeable.

A group doing some weird stuff in Central Park.

Washington Square Arch. Not quite as impressive as Arc de Triomphe.

This guy (IG: @howdidyougetthepianohere) was casually playing Chopin in the middle of Washington Square Park. The piano is custom made (cost around $60 000) so that the acoustics are best underneath the piano.

Charging Bull (near Wall st)

A tower named after some real estate mogul.

Times Square.

Madison Square Garden.

Edmonton Oilers @ New York Rangers, before national anthems. Got to witness the first NHL goal by Kaapo Kakko from just 20m away!

Dallas Cowboys @ New York Jets (MetLife stadium). Americans seem to be a bit confused with the definition of football.

Couple of Finnish guys (Aleksander Barkov and Henrik Borgström).

My seat was pretty close to the action.

Me in the red circle (NHL.com). Guess I'm famous now.

Mammoth skeleton in Museum of Natural History.

Triceratops.

T-rex.

Winter is coming

It's starting to get chilly (=rainy and windy) out here. There has been exciting events such as Curtis day (I live in Curtis House), which I do not dare talk about here, but also more virtuous activities such as intramural football (not the American kind) yesterday. And I didn't even break any of my fingers! Also my parents visited me about a week ago, and we explored around St. John's and the Avalon Peninsula (pictures of cliffs below). But perhaps the most noticeable change in my everyday life has been the start of the NHL season. It's weird not having to wake up at 2 AM to watch a game, and that's probably why I've watched about 20 hours of hockey in the past week.

First impressions of courses

Since this blog should be focused on studying and school, I figured I might write out first impressions of each of my courses. I'll discuss them in more detail probably late November or December, when I've completed term papers and other assignments. Before that I should mention, that the university system is a bit different here. Rather than completing your Bachelor's (~3yrs) and Master's (~2yrs) degrees like in Finland, most people seem to go for only a Bachelor's degree (~4yrs). So I'm actually completing both undergrad (Bachelor's) and grad (Master's) courses here.

English 1020: Writing for Second Language Students (undergrad) is a course that is pretty well summarized by its title: it's an introduction to academic writing and reading for English as second language students. Most of the theoretical stuff in this course is taught in high school in Finland, but there are some things that are specific to English or Canadian academic writing. And by having to write stuff in English, you obviously get better at it both in grammar and in fluency. So in retrospect this might not be the best course to take as an exchange student, unless you're new or unfamiliar with academic writing. The teacher (at least in my case) has good expertise and is one of the better teachers I've come across here.

Engineering 3941: Production Technology (undergrad) is an overview of production. The lecturer is actually the only one of my teachers that speaks English as his first language, which makes following the lectures much easier. The content is new to me, so the lectures, projects and labs are interesting as well. Or as interesting as something not energy tech related can be. There's a lab each week in a machine shop, where you get to do operations such as turning, milling and drilling. By the end of the course you should have an air engine you've build and machined yourself, which is pretty cool. Projects include e.g. designing a few objects that are 3D-printed and laser cut, and reverse engineering e.g. an electric motor. The course is actually quite a lot of work, but it's also intriguing since you get to do something other than sit in a lecture or in front of a computer the whole time.

Engineering 9614: Renewable Energy and Resource Conservation (grad) is an interesting course (at least for me) on paper, but the reality is unfortunately a bit disappointing. There are appealing subjects such as hydrogen storage or tidal power, but the lectures are not that useful and you'd have to look up publications or books yourself to get a reasonable understanding of a subject. I'm guessing the lecturer doesn't have much experience in teaching, since she tends to get tangled up on irrelevant details or fails to give proper instructions for assignments that results in people asking the same thing (e.g. where to return it) over and over again individually, when she could just post proper instructions online. Half of a lecture might be spent on discussing what a Stirling engine is, when a couple of pictures or a short animation clip on a lecture slide would provide much more clarity than discussing the subject with a single student after going through 10 bullet points in a lecture slide. So, overall the subjects and the outline of the course are fine, but the implementation is lacking.

Engineering 9627: Environmental Systems Engineering (grad) is about optimization modelling of different systems (at least so far). I've taken quite a few modelling courses in the past couple of years back home, but apparently I've managed to dodge optimization modelling altogether, since this is the first time I'm actually learning about the theory behind it. So it's a pleasant surprise, because I wasn't sure what to expect when I enrolled on the course. Again, the lecturer is new to teaching, not speaking English as a first language and sometimes the explanations are not that clear. That creates some challenges when there's stuff like Lagrange's equations (which is not something that is freshly imprinted on my mind) implemented in actual engineering problems, but so far I've managed to hang on. And hopefully the focus will shift towards computer aided modelling, which should make things easier. Overall the lectures are fine, and I think this will prove to be the most useful course for me this Fall.

What's next?

The midterm break and Thanksgiving are coming up, and I've got plane tickets to New York. More about that next time.

-Aapo

Europe should be that way (Signal Hill, St. John's)

St. John's from Signal Hill

Still St. John's

I spotted the campus

Cabot Tower, Signal Hill

Cape Spear (~10 km SE from St. John's)

"New" lighthouse (Cape Spear)

WW II posters (Cape Spear)

A small island near Ferryland (~60 km south from St. John's)

Getting known to MUN

No more orientation, welcome events and get-to-know-one-another activities. By now everyday life is about studying during the day and something else in the evening. I've been more or less sick for over a week now, which is my excuse for not exploring the city as much as I would have liked. So this post will be brief and mostly about the MUN campus, and how it differs from LUT.

The campus

MUN campus (hospital and faculty of medicine missing from bottom left)

First of all, MUN campus is quite big compared to LUT. Just the distance from one end (Music building) to another (Faculty of medicine, missing from the map) is roughly twice the distance between the furthermost points of Saimia and Student Union House back home. And since there are so many different programs available, it's no wonder. The classrooms and facilities are not that different from LUT, except that they are mostly older and divided into several different buildings.

Nearly all the buildings in the picture are connected to each other with tunnels (MUNnels) or walkways. At first I was happy to walk outside when the sun was shining and you could just wear shorts and t-shirts without a problem. Now when it's raining sideways, I'd rather take the MUNnels.

Beneath Paton College (residences).

Between academic buildings.

Apart from classrooms and tunnels, there's a field house (free for students), including indoor tracks, swimming pool, gyms and courts for different games. Gyms are a bit weird though, since machines are located in multiple rooms in different floors. There's a large library including classics such as Kalevala and Seitsemän Veljestä. University centre has all kinds of services for students, e.g. bookstore, food court and a small store. And if you think study books are expensive in Finland, I can assure you, they're not. As I mentioned briefly in the previous post, there's also some money allocated on your student account to use in cafes around the campus, so you could get Subway or other stuff a lot of times without paying anything extra.

I'm taking four different courses, that I will cover more thoroughly later. One of them is an English course, one is an undergrad engineering course and two are grad engineering courses. Teaching methods are similar to LUT: on language courses you should attend most of the classes, and there's lots of minor assignments/homework and class interaction. On engineering courses you should attend classes as well, but attendance is not enforced or followed (apart from labs). Lectures are as you would except, there are individual and group assignments/projects and laboratory sessions seem to be more common.

What else?

Not much, I've went to downtown a couple of times, watched N hours of Netflix while sick and hanged out with the people from my house. There are quite a lot of events in the evenings, but I won't get too deep into those here. I'm slowly starting to plan out stuff to do on the weekends, so maybe next time I'll have cooler pictures to show.

-Aapo

Don't leave your door unlocked.

On my way home.

Welcome to St. John's

It's been a week since I moved in to my room at MUN (Memorial University of Newfoundland) campus. There's been orientation, information sessions and even a few actual lectures during this time. Not to mention evening activities. Campus is much bigger compared to LUT, but luckily there's a tunnel (MUNnel) system underground between different buildings and residence, so you don't have to experience outdoors if you don't want to. In this post I'll go through my first thoughts about living here, on-campus at MUN and in Canada.

What's it like living in Canada compared to Finland?

The most noticeable thing is that people are very friendly and much more talkative than in Finland (surprise). Also, Aapo seems to be a hard name to pronounce (too many vowels?) and Finland appears to be the most exciting country ever. It's been a fun week, and apart from actually having to do some actual school work it's probably going to be a fun semester as well.

There are lots of small details that you wouldn't even think about before actually coming here. E.g. Finnish tap water is the best in the world, mobile data transfer is practically free in Finland and cars in Europe are small. In Canada everything seems to be sponsored, there are STOP -signs on nearly every intersection, there are hardly any bicycles and both snow days and those yellow school buses actually are real things. Using credit/debit cards sometimes include extra fees, sometimes not, and I have no idea why. Everything from taps to wall sockets and mattresses to door knobs/handles are different. So far the most intimidating thing in Canada has been to try and use waffle machines that seem to be everywhere, maybe next week I'll have enough courage. Apart from all the minor details, transition to living here has been quite painless. And at least SI units are used and people like ice hockey, so there's something in common.

Language-wise English here is easy to understand, most people speak without any too thick accent or dialect. And most of my speech seems to be understood as well. Food-wise the differences have not been that significant so far. But like any Finn, I'll probably start missing rye bread pretty soon.

Housing and living on campus

There's a variety of different housing options available at campus. There are apartments, usually shared, as well as dormitory style houses with single and double bedrooms. Primarily I applied for a room in an apartment style residence, and had dormitory residence as my backup option. After all, housing is guaranteed for all new students, so I figured that would be the easiest way to get a place for this Fall. I ended up missing the initial time slot for a room selection, because for some reason you can have a webmail where you can write emails, but not receive (most of) them, thus me missing info about the time slot. Therefore I got auto-allocated to a double bedroom at House Curtis, Paton College. Am I sorry about that? Not at all, and here's why:

When beginning your studies at LUT, guilds are usually the kind of communities where you would meet your first friends, tutors and older students. There are guild rooms, there are events just for the guild and usually big portion of your friends would be from the same guild. I don't believe there are any organizations similar to guilds at MUN. But luckily, there are houses. People at your house are the first ones you're going to meet, orientation is mostly done with the people from your house and there are some events specifically for the people from your house. In practice, houses are kind of like guilds, but they're for the people living under the same roof instead of for the people studying the same major. And I think that's really nice, because people are studying completely different things and still there's a great community you are a part of. So if you're thinking about studying here, I'd highly recommend campus residence, so that you get to be part of a house and the awesome community coming with it.

Double bedroom example from MUN website. I didn't dare include a real photo of my room.

What's also good about the houses, is that everything is taken care of without having to do much yourself. Common spaces are cleaned, there's always food available (see below), broken stuff gets (eventually) fixed, rooms are furnished and so on. It's almost like I'm living with my parents, except I'm probably one of the oldest people here and I don't have to do as much chores.

Of course, there are also downsides of living in these types of houses. There's not much privacy compared to e.g. Finland, where practically all students have own or shared apartments. Having shared common spaces with other people requires a lot of rules, which is both understandable and sometimes irritating. It's also somewhat expensive (about 1950 CAD / 1350 € per semester), since living off-campus you'd get a shared apartment for the same price except without someone cleaning the common spaces and all that. Apartment style on-campus housing would be even more expensive. Also food is an additional (and obligatory) cost required for those living in these houses, and by buying and making your own food you'd save a lot. So what you're practically paying for is to have somebody do your food and some of the cleaning for you, and for me that's worth the money at least while living abroad.

As mentioned, for those living in certain campus residences buying a meal plan is obligatory. It's not cheap (about 2500 CAD / 1700 € per semester), but it covers almost everything: you can eat as much as you want during dining hall opening hours (7 am - 8 pm). Compared to Finnish student restaurants, dining hall is like combining 3 restaurants and a cafeteria together with the exception that you can eat as much as you want, and anything you want. Including desserts and all that. And it's ~50 m from your house. There's also a certain amount of money fixed in to your account that you can spend on cafes and restaurants around campus, if you don't feel like walking over 5 minutes to eat between classes or you want something different. So instead of living on noodles the whole semester, you could just eat pizza and ice cream as much as you want. I try not to.

Dining hall from outside (MUN website)

Next post will most likely be about 2 weeks from now. I'll probably introduce the university and the city of St. John's more thoroughly, once I get to know to places better myself. And I'll try to remember to take pictures myself, instead of just going through MUN websites.

-Aapo