Speech by the Chair of the HYY Board at the opening of the academic year 2025-2026

Our Chair of the Board Petra Pulli attended the opening of the academic year on 1 September 2025 and gave a speech for teachers.

Dear rector, chancellor and university community

You often hear that May Day is the best time for students, but I have to say that I do not personally think the start of a new academic year and the new students it brings all over campuses is far off behind.

I hope that the beginning of the new academic year and the arrival of new students elicits as much joy and enthusiasm in you too, dear teachers – joy over the desire of new students to learn as much as they can about their discipline and enthusiasm for sharing your expertise with us fresher members of academia.

I was asked to write a speech from students to teachers, and I eagerly started writing down all the things I have wanted to say to my teachers over these years. At some point, I realised that my speech was becoming increasingly like a letter to Santa Claus. However, the two situations actually have a lot of similarities. Many of us students were waiting to get accepted into university like a child looking forward to Christmas Eve, excited and full of dreams of what awaits us.

So here it is, the wish list of a student eagerly awaiting the new academic year, addressed not to Santa Claus but to you, the teachers of our university:

We students want to grow into experts in our respective disciplines. We want to be builders of the future, changing the world with our skills. Help us access information and guide us to develop throughout our studies with constructive feedback. We need your support to find the areas in which we have room for growth and development. The academic world is completely new and unknown to many of us, and we need individual guidance on where to find the keys to growth and development. Support us on our journey towards finding the subject we are passionate about and help us build our own study path towards that subject.

We ask this from you, teachers, because we have immense respect for the expertise and knowhow you have. We believe that your guidance will make it possible for us to reach the same level of expertise that you represent to us. We want to hear about the subjects and insights that inspired you during your careers. We are interested in hearing about your latest findings and what made you really get into research in your discipline. We hope to be able to draw inspiration from your excitement towards our discipline.

Let’s create new opportunities for learning and cooperate on developing teaching that meets the needs of us students, society and working life. We students are experts in student experience and want to participate in the development of our teaching. Let’s grow together as givers and receivers of feedback and create conditions that allow feedback to bloom into the next top ideas and developmental paths of university education.

To enable us to grow in our expertise, we need a safe environment in which to learn. A safe learning environment has room for humour, mistakes, new ideas and all the feelings that these can awaken. Many of us students have left our own community behind and moved to an entirely new environment, filled with new people, to pursue our studies. Please help us ensure that this community accepts each and every one of us the way we are. Let’s serve as examples to one another on how we can make every space and situation as safe as possible for all of us.

With 30,000 of us at the University, we students are a diverse group, and we hope that this fact is kept in mind in all dealings with us. We come here from all over Finland and the world. We have grown in different families and cultures. We all arrive at the University from our own individual situation in life. Studies are important to us, but there is so much life outside them too, and sometimes it tries to get in the way of our studies.

Historically large cuts have been made to student subsistence during the current government term, with an increasing number of students living below the poverty line. The pressure to take out more loan than we can bear is high, driving many of us to work at the expense of study progress – whether we would like to or not.

Dear teachers, we ask for your understanding when our balance in life and personal wellbeing falter. We want to succeed in our studies, but sometimes progressing in them in a traditional way is not possible. When this happens, we need compromises in terms of the methods of realising study units and the completion methods on courses. This does not mean that we want to take the easiest route, it only means that completing courses is made possible in different situations in life.

Life sometimes tests every one of us, and when this happens, we still want to hold onto our studies and, above all, this community. Let’s make the university a place where everyone can feel good to return even from difficult situations in life. The university community has held me up through the most difficult times in my life, and the fact that I am still allowed to be a member of this community is thanks to my friends here and the teachers who treated me with compassion.

According to the 2021 Finnish Student Health and Wellbeing Survey (KOTT), around one in three students did not feel like they belong in any study-related group. The same study found that around one in four students feel lonely.

Every third student does not choose to remain outside the university community themselves. It is our duty as a university community to help new students as well as any older students who have remained outside the community against their will become a part of our community. We at the Student Union and in hundreds of student organisations do our own part for this, and we are inviting you, dear teachers, to join the effort.

By creating an open discussion environment and a collegial atmosphere, we can show these students that they are a welcome addition to our community. In fact, they are the missing piece, to quote Robin’s song that I sang in karaoke with my own fresher group. The experiences students have of studies and related communities during their first year of study build the foundation for their attachment to the study community.

Now is our time to show what kind of a community we are. Are we a community that invites people to participate? A community where everyone faces one another with an open mind? A community that comes together at times of joy as well as sorrow?

I hope that we could be a community that stands together even amid global crises. A community that also discusses difficult topics and works together to build a more just and sustainable society by means of science. I hope that our community stands on the side of the weak, whether that is here in Finland, in Palestine, or in Ukraine. A university community that cares about its community and the world around it also includes the people who society often excludes.