Global Strategy - blog

Last week, after few ‘nothing scheduled' days, my overly planning-oriented mind had already begun to show symptoms of anxiety. There was, quite understandably, a fair amount of ambiguity concerning my future studies. No student handbook, no precise timetable (later I learned there was, but I had been looking in all the wrong places). Then, on Thursday, the induction circus finally commenced here at LSE.

After two well-packed days it was all over. In fact, the time also allowed many relaxed discussions and ‘getting-to-know-each-other' chats. We were even offered a welcoming lunch in a beautifully maintained old library (that must have served its purpose when all the great philosophers were very young). What was truly remarkable, however, was the school's (or the presenters') ability to - well, I'll just give you an example. Native speakers of Finnish can appreciate the concept of ‘läpsystä vaihtoon'. This is exactly what happened.

Speaker after another, most of them delightfully apt to round the corners of their sometimes serious message with a heavy dose of the famed English sense of humour, gave their presentations in a warm, welcoming but nevertheless precise manner. Moreover, the thing that really caught my attention, perhaps because of my Finnish-German -axis education, was the fact that they never exceeded their time constraints. Presentation after presentation followed the format of: ‘welcome, content, thank you'.

May it be called ‘professionalism', ‘rhetorical institutionalism', ‘perfection through practice' or whatever - they were simply quite impressing. Besides, and despite all the rationalising, I have to admit that some facts might also have influenced my subsequent feelings. After all, UK's biggest career services do not happen to be in any university - nor does the world's number one library in the field of social sciences.