The speech from the opening ceremony of the academic year 2024 is available: Vice Principal/Director of Education Päivi Marjanen

Humak’s academic year opening ceremony will be held as an online event with a program on Monday, 9th September 2024, starting at 2:00 PM on Humak’s YouTube channel. Read the speech by Vice Principal/Director of Education Päivi Marjanen.

Dear Humak students and staff.

I began my 2020 graduation speech with the words “We are living in exceptional times”. Like many others, I have used this expression far too often in recent years. What does exceptional times mean?
The historian Harari notes that every generation wants to see its own era as meaningful. We chart our lives with numbers but we also label the decades we have lived with words. Years pass and the lines change, but it’s important, particularly for you students, that we find the language to describe the years and the passage of time.

It will be interesting to hear in the future, how our current decade is talked about in Finland and around the world. I do not wish for this decade to be labelled a decade of deepening polarisation, a decade marked by the erosion of democracy, a surge in mental health problems, the decline of culture and the erosion of human rights, such as linguistic accessibility. I hope we will be able to speak of a stabilising of world politics, of increasing prosperity, of community, and of the formation of new kinds of communities.

I hope to hear from this decade that you, students, have seized the moment and lived. I hope to hear that you challenged the old and that you created new things. I hope to hear that you deepened your knowledge but also that you questioned it and re-evaluated it as your skills and understanding grew.

I have thought a lot in recent years about the skills and knowledge that the future workplace will demand. I have also spoken about this topic to you, dear colleagues and students, a lot. We learn and we teach what we believe will be needed in the future world of work. There are some definite skills we should have in the light of research findings and interview data we’ve collected at Humak. Education and training can impart general workplace skills, but first and foremost we need to learn to treat others as human beings.

Genuinely engaging with others is a skill and one we should all practise daily. I believe it is also a workplace skill and one that will be increasingly needed in the future in both our professional and private lives.
2025 will see the start of an updated strategy for Humak. Our new strategy articulates more clearly the values we hold at Humak. Community, responsibility, equality and humanity are all strongly reflected in our value proposition.

Over the past few years, as part of development-focused practical training placements, Humak students have carried out extensive data collection, which, by the way, currently numbers around 580 interviews. Here is a snippet from one of the interviews that I’ve anonymised.

My hope is that we never lose that basic thing: engaging with people. Because that’s where everything starts. I hope we never become such big shots that we have to disappear behind closed doors somewhere to crow about being such fine professionals. I hope we can always get out there with the people and give them our everything and give them the chance to engage: to meet and to be met.

This meaningful interaction with others aligns well with our value proposition. I hope for many such encounters both on campus and online this academic year.

I wish you all a productive and rewarding academic year.

Päivi Marjanen
Vice Principal and Director of Education