Student story: Anna Abonyi

I am Anna, a 29-year-old Inter­na­tional Busi­ness student from Hungary. Before moving to Finland I used to work with human resources and payroll. In 2019 I got engaged with my partner, who studied in Finland at the time and also I decided to move so that we could start our life together. We ended up in Joensuu and soon I real­ized that even though I already learned Finnish, I still needed to develop my language skills before I could find a suit­able job. This was how I first encoun­tered Karelia UAS as I started doing Finnish language courses at the Open UAS.

After complet­ing some courses, I decided to apply for the Inter­na­tional Busi­ness degree programme to refresh my knowl­edge and develop new skills in the field I previ­ously had a career in. I real­ized quickly how differ­ent the study envi­ron­ment in Finland is compared to my home country. The Finnish style of study­ing fits me perfectly. It has more of a prac­ti­cal approach, and we constantly work with real life cases, which helps me recog­niz­ing the actual useful­ness of the tools and knowl­edge that we gain, not to mention the flex­i­bil­ity! The latter surprised me the most, as I’m used to the rigid­ity of school schedules.

In the Inter­na­tional Busi­ness programme we spend the first year essen­tially learn­ing the basics of busi­ness manage­ment. In the year I’m currently complet­ing we focus more on inter­na­tional oper­a­tions, and how to adapt our knowl­edge to an inter­na­tional sphere and later the focus will shift to inter­na­tional account manage­ment. The univer­sity encour­ages us to start network­ing already, for example we get to do study visits to local compa­nies. What I appre­ci­ate very much it that we have oppor­tu­ni­ties both for longer and for short-term exchanges. For me spend­ing a semes­ter in one of our partner univer­si­ties is not a viable option, but this doesn’t mean I have to give up on these expe­ri­ences, and there is a large selec­tion of other oppor­tu­ni­ties to choose from.