Behind the scenes: Club International Tampere

Tampere loves CLINT - at least so it says on the members' hoodies. But why? Who are CLINT and what
are they doing?

CLINT's "working clothes"

Club International Tampere (CLINT) is a sub-organisation of our student union Tamko and consists of currently 6 members who are all both students at TAMK and International Tutors of Tamko. The board members for the upcoming autumn semester are chairperson Sanna Hosike, vice chairperson Annika Dillenburger, pick-up coordinator Essi Ihalainen, event organizer Marjut Lievonen, survival kit coordinator Dylan Rafferty and webmistress Iida-Maria Järvi.

It is quiet in TAMK during summer, however, behind the scenes there is a lot of preparation going on in order to organize the upcoming semester in the best possible way. That includes also CLINT who are already preparing for a wave of new exchange students that want to be taken care of and entertained.
About 120 survival kits are returned in the beginning of summer by the exchange students who are leaving back to their homecountries and all of them have to be checked by CLINT, so they can be given to the new incoming exchange students in the fall without missing or unusable contents.

CLINT is checking the survival kits

Even though there is a separate person in charge of the survival kits, usually all available CLINT members do the survival kit checking in team work, because it is much faster and of course also a lot more fun.

 With teamwork every task is finished twice as fast

Also the dates for the upcoming exchange student events during autumn have to be decided on and arranged and most venues and means of transportation have to be reserved well in advance, so also the event organizer has some amount of tasks to do during the teaching-free summer period.

Busiest during the summer is pick-up coordinator Essi, as she has to keep track of all exchange student arrivals - a record number of 180 this autumn - and make sure all of them are picked up by their tutor.

So if you are an exchange student about to arrive to TAMK - WELCOME! As you can see, CLINT is prepared and waiting for you!

Text: Annika Dillenburger, Trainee, International Services
Photos: Club International Tampere

New international tutors are trained and ready!

Among many other TAMK students, Jyrki Paldán and Jarkko Oksanen took part in the International Tutor Training organized by Tamko Student Union this week.

The engineering students Jarkko and Jyrki are already looking forward to the arrival of the exchange students next autumn. They have both been already in exchange, Jyrki in Iceland and Jarkko in Hungary, and they enjoyed their time abroad. Now they have a possibility to meet new people and have international contacts in Finland too. Jarkko wishes to have a Hungarian tutoree in order to learn some Hungarian language.

As they both have already exchange experience and also experience of being a peer tutor, they’re convinced that being an international tutor can’t be difficult. The first task to the tutors is to contact their tutorees in June and help them with the arrangements by answering to the tricky questions that incoming students might have.

During the two sessions this week, the becoming tutors learned a lot of useful information about practical matters, tutor’s responsibilities, cultural challenges etc. The participants of the training represented many different TAMK degree programs and campuses including Kuntokatu, Virrat, Ikaalinen and Finlayson campuses.

Text and photo: Kaisa Merilahti, International Services