I wrote this post both to share about my study in Finland and the importance of story-telling to make a successful convey of our ideas, and also to remind how incredible story-telling can help to spread information to make a positive impact in society and human development. I believe each of us could both benefit from and contribute to something when we have good skills in story-telling and presentation.
My further study in Finland: LAB & the course Anticipating Future Trends and Innovation Management
At LAB University of Applied Sciences, the school I am pursuing to study deeper in technology in Finland, last semester I had a chance to join a special subject named Anticipating Future Trends and Innovation Management. This course encouraged and enabled us to think out of the box with our maximum imagination about possible future trends, anything which could be related to human life in the future.
As I know, the main topic of the course changed variously every semester, and for my semester, the topic was related to future education & classroom, and the thing which made our course even much more realistic and interesting was we had a chance to involved in ISKU Teach & Learn Anywhere concept, where we came up with ideas to help ISKU be able to bring learning chances to every location, especially locations having crises like the earthquake happened in Turkey, the war in Ukraine, and places having natural disasters, where children do not have good access to education.
A visit to ISKU
After the visit to ISKU company and listening to the Vice President of ISKU, Ms. Elise Tarvainen, who shared the idea concept and expressed happiness by having us involved in the development of the idea. I went home and thought about some places in Vietnam, where natural disasters happen every year and millions of children have to delay their development both in knowledge and physical condition.
We worked as teams for several weeks with the guidance of Ms. Marja Viljanen, our lecturer, to prepare for the final presentation day at school where we would convey our ideas and SWOT analysis for ISKU, together with other brainstormed ideas for future learning aspects.
I remembered when I did my work focused on analyzing the situations in Vietnam, a teammate argued that ISKU was a luxury brand, and they could not work as the way of charity organization like bringing their furniture to poor places with no profits. However, I always remembered what Ms. Elise Tarvainen said in her introduction about the idea to us, which was “Let’s forget about the furniture!” because she knew ISKU was a famous furniture company in Finland and students might have some biases toward the brand.
Final presentation: the compliment as a good story-teller & the emotion in conveying the story of children’s development in Vietnam
At the final presentation, I started the presentation of my team with my part focused on the Vietnam situation of children in some hard locations, and I opened my part by leading the story and my thinking process from the day I heard Ms. Elise Tarvainen shared the idea of ISKU Teach & Learn Anywhere concept, I spoke out how I felt about that at that time, how I came up with ideas, and how children in Vietnam in the current situation and how they needed to access education to develop as any normal kids in other happy and safe places. I just remembered that I brought my true thinking and related feelings into the presentation a lot.
When my team finished, the thing I absolutely did not expect was that Ms. Elise Tarvainen, the Vice President of ISKU and successful inspiring speaker, looked at me and said “Very excellent and fabulous! You are a very good story-teller!”, and shared what she thought about how I started my presentation with nice leading thinking accompanied with where the story began and how it continued to process.
There was a thing that made me very emotional, it was when she said “You are right, the future of children has to be put on first, without it, luxury furniture is nothing. What is the luxury furniture for when there is no fulfillment in basic need?”. She also shared that she visited those poor areas I shared in Vietnam, she did see it, feel it, and was very emotional, too.
Finnish in my eyes — those thoughtful and kindhearted people
This presentation was very special to me, in which I realized why Finland was a happy country. Ms. Elise Tarvainen used to say to us, students, that “Children are the future, you are our future”. As a successful person in both education and business, she also traveled to many places enough to see and feel, and she really shared the pain that children in a developing country like Vietnam were facing.
I felt very grateful when being here, learning Finnish’s kindhearted and thoughtful attitude, and their mindset of humanity in every development aspect.
Below, I am sharing the slides from our team presentation in which there was a part about Vietnamese children in some hard situations to access education, and my ideas and analysis if you would like to have a look.
Looking back, I am so thankful for the moment I am now. Sometimes we forget that there are many unlucky children and countries that need more of our caring and help, and since learning more about the case and humanity development of ISKU, I am happy because I know there are many people and organizations, with big hearts in humanity like ISKU organization and Ms. Elise Tarvainen, are looking toward helping people in those areas such as in Vietnam, my home country.
Here I also attached my interested links which show the creative innovations of ISKU in the learning & healthcare areas:
https://isku.com/en/learning/
https://isku.com/en/other-spaces/health-and-care/
**ISKU is a very successful family business, which is a big organization in Finland.
More of my English posts on Medium: https://medium.com/@sylvievu