The upcoming Junior Winter School 2025 in Finland – enhancing skills while enjoying unforgettable winter adventures!

First part of the 10 Days of INGENIUM event will take place in Finland and Xamk’s Mikkeli campus, from February 10–14. During the week, bachelor students will have the opportunity to explore multidisciplinary topics, gain international exposure, and experience Finland’s stunning nature.

The theme for the next edition of Junior Winter School 2025 in Finland is “From Idea to Disruption: Transforming Visions into Innovations.” During the week the international participants from 10 European countries are collaborating and solving interesting real-life stakeholders’ cases while recognizing challenges and opportunities in a business environment.

Learning-by-doing experience

–The idea of Junior Winter School and it’s topic came quite fast, we wanted students to work on something real and to apply the knowledge they gained during their studies. Xamk has a vast stakeholder network from many different business fields, and many have been keen on cooperating with us, to create and work on challenging cases for our students to solve. With the support of the Social and Healthcare Educational Department lecturers Miia Myllymäki and Perttu Noponen, we could create together the combination of pedagogical approaches and implemented learning-by-doing experience, says project manager Sabine Suorsa.

The Junior Winter School consists of 2 pre-online sessions and the on-site week in Finland, as well as 1 after-online session, to finalize all the projects and make them ready for the stakeholders to use and implement them in their daily business environment.

–We decided to use Discord community as our online platform, to communicate with our students and mentors, provide them with teaching materials, connect them with our stakeholders, interact with all the Junior Winter School participants, and get valuable support from our mentors from all 10 INGENIUM partner universities. This solution has been very beneficial, as we can interact with students in need of guidance and support with their cases, says Suorsa.

–This community also helps us to communicate with the students not only work and development related but also create a community feeling by having casual talk and introducing each other.

The Junior Winter School is worth 3 ECTS, which means students need to work on the cases in a team to find solutions which can be used in the future, these extra demanding tasks can be a challenge for the students, as some of them are having in the moment exams to focus on.

–As we can see in our Discord community platform, students are excited to meet each other in Finland and get the experience to be as far up north in Europe, for the first time, Sabine Suorsa continues.

New friendships and new opportunities

–Even though the workload is demanding, we believe new friendships, new opportunities, and new ways of learning are approaching them. We are in constant contact with the students, and through Discord we already had good conversations about the journey to Mikkeli, what to be aware of, how cold it could be and most of all how beautiful the surroundings and the Finnish nature will be, Suorsa says.

The experience will expand entrepreneurial skills, design thinking, multicultural teamwork, and communication skills to another level. The cases will be focused on the topics of Nature and Wellbeing, Smart Cities, Circular Economy, Logistics and Security, and Digitalization and Tourism.

The teams will aim to develop the best outcomes for the clients real-life processes. The final results will be presented to the audience and corporate clients on Friday, February 14th.

During the intensive and fun Junior School week in Finland one of the highlights of the week will surely be the Tuesday afternoon Winter Experience, when participants will have a chance to experience the wonderful Finnish nature, including the possibility of sauna and ice swimming, and other winter adventures.

Stay up to date with the event platform

At campus the attending students can contact Sabine Suorsa for more info or guidance. Info package, the Guide for Visitors, has also been gathered for the arrivals to let them know what to expect and how to prepare for visit. Visitors should also take advantage of the Liveto event platform to stay up to date with the program and schedules, venues and performers, restaurants etc. Regarding Junior School, daily communication will also continue on Discord. The programs can also be found on the INGENIUM website.