Europe Trip Part 4: The American Contingent

Helsinki, Finland

Monday, June 7

The first day of classes in the summer school was full of coincidences. First, I happened to check the schedule right before bed on Sunday and realized the sessions didn't start until 9am, not 8am like I'd thought, so I set my alarm back a bit.

In the morning, I walked in to the breakfast room at 7:15 and immediately heard a voice exclaim, "Peter! I should've known I'd meet somebody I knew while I was here!" only to look up and recoginze Donny Katz, a student I'd met at Georgia Tech's grad school visitation weekend a year before. After eating breakfast together and heading across the bay to the suburb of Espoo, the location of Aalto University, we stepped off the bus to hear from behind us - in a full American accent - "Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech bags? You all must be off to the conference," and turned around to meet Katherine Kortum, a UT Austin grad student who had not only been on our bus but also happened to be staying at our hotel.

So the day was 90 minutes old, and I'd already gone from being alone in a new country to finding myself in a group of the only 3 American students at the conference, all of whom were staying in the same hostel, on the same floor no less. Wild.

The incredibly convenient bus stop outside the hotel. It comes every 4 minutes, and only takes 20 minutes to get to the next town over.

So we wandered around Aalto University - named for that architect because he made the master plan and designed the main building - a recently formed conglomeration of 3 separate schools for engineering, business, and architecture/design, taking photos of the iconic buildings. As it turned out, we had plenty of spare time for this stemming from the fact that the bus line to the university starts two blocks from our hotel and ends 150 yards from Aalto's civil engineering building, taking only about 15 minutes with a bus coming every 4 minutes during peak travel times like ours. It realy was truly convenient, we remarked, as we entered the lecture hall that was to be our "home" for the next 5 days.

I won't really go too much into the topics covered in the conference, as its topic - "Reason-Building for Decision-Making in the Transport Sector" - is probably a bit beyond the range of interests of non-transportation people. For that matter, there are probably actually very few transportation engineers that would find it interesting. But I'll suffice it to say that we are scheduled to hear presentations on a number of topics - from natural-language based statistical analysis ("possibility theory") to environmental impacts to regional planning of the EU's new freight networ to public input in the planning process to something called "theoryless planning" and more, presented by people from all around Europe and throughout the world.

Aalto's main building. The lower part of the bowl has benches and is used for lectures when the weather is nice. I should note that the Finns have a much broader range of what they consider "nice".

On the evening of the first night, we were treated to an opening reception at the local office of one of Europe's major engineering firms, Ramboll consulting. Highlights of the evening included a presentation on some of Ramboll's major projects, the quasi-traditional Finnish cuisine, and even the roving, guitar-strumming entertainer who sang - very enthusiastically, I might add - songs fluently in at least 5 languages (Finnish, Swedish, English, Spanish, Italian) throughout the night.

Dr. Kikuchi (my advisor) does not look thrilled to be stuck next to the guitar man.

As the night (can I call it that even if it was still fully bright at 8pm?) wore on, I got to meet many of the other participants. The conference was attended by students (and people seeking continuing education credits) from a great many countires: Finland, the UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Norway, Sudan, Nigeria, and Morocco, in addition to the 3 Americans. It really looks to be quite an interesting experience.