to the "Finnish-Russian CBU Master Program in International Relation" blog! (for your relief, from now on the "CBU-Blog"!)
To start with, a presentation of myself and the Program itself.
This is Stefano De Luca writing, Italian student in the University of Tampere. What is a Southern (or even "continental" European, as I've also been called often) doing so up North as in Finland?
This is Stefano De Luca writing, Italian student in the University of Tampere. What is a Southern (or even "continental" European, as I've also been called often) doing so up North as in Finland?
The answer is quite easy: studying! After having achieved my Bachelor degree in Italy in Political Science/"Diplomatic and international studies", I was continuing there my curriculum. My interests of study were since the beginning Northern Europe and Russia, but the courses tended to be too general and more regionally focused in the Balkans or Middle East. The CBU Master Program in International Relations, was actually the most similar degree to what I want to specialize in, so I enrolled in immediately when possible. I went through the bureaucratic process of selection, was accepted and thus started my new Finnish university life in the summer 2009!
The acronym CBU stands for Cross-Border University, that is because our degree is planned and organized together with some North-Western Russian universities: specifically in our case, between the University of Tampere in Finland, the State University of Petrozavodsk, in Karelia, and the State University of Saint Petersburg in Russia. So, it is a cross-border cooperation program between Finland and Russia, and what it entails is a common "Study Program" recognized by both the countries, between three groups of students from the three universities, with a series of Autumn/Springs Schools: periods of 1-2 weeks of common courses held in one of the participant universities. Be sure, reader, that I'll describe them in future posts, but for now I can tell you that we had the 2009 Autumn School in Tampere, the 2010 Spring School in Petrozavodsk and the Autumn 2010 in Saint Petersburg (We just came back yesterday ... ).
Our majors are International Relations, Russian/European Media, and Russian/European Studies. Our focus is thus (as I was looking for), IR between Northern Europe, the European Union and Russia, Russian and other Nordic languages and their culture in the widest sense. All courses are held in English.
All together, we are around 20 students, 5 from Tampere. Small group, but effective! And pretty international too: two Finnish (Leena and Laura), a Swedish (Sini), a Finnish-American (Erik) and the "Southerner" (myself). We got along pretty well since the very beginning, also for the continuous common courses and Thesis Seminars we had together. More on the structure of the studies and our experiences in the last year coming up in the next posts.
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