Students charter train to the Shanghai Expo

Aalto On Tracks sets off on a long ride east

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By Olavi Koistinen
     
      “I just wanted to ask if it might be possible to rent a train. We need to get to Shanghai from Moscow. We aren’t a company, or an organisation - just a group of students...”
      “They didn’t really take us seriously at the other end”, recalls Santeri Everi.
      “The first responses were that it isn’t possible. We didn’t give up. After all, it must be possible. There are plenty of trains in Russia, after all."
     
In December, a few students at the new Aalto University, Everi included, started to think about an off-the-wall idea; what if we would go by train to China, to the Shanghai Expo?
      “Initially, the idea seemed crazy in the extreme, but later it seemed somehow plausible.
      “We started to ponder what kind of a bunch we would take with us, and why we should make the trip.”
     
On Friday, a group of 82 passengers climbed into the train carriages at Helsinki Railway Station. Everi and the other travellers were dragging goods onto the train in the hot weather.
      “Here we have computers, projectors, and speakers”, Everi explains, with sweat gleaming on his forehead.
     
Most of the passengers are students at Aalto University, which was formed through the merger of the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki University of Economics and Business Administration, and the University of Art and Design.
      This is still an ordinary scheduled train they are boarding. Their private chartered train is waiting in Moscow to take them all the way to the Chinese border.
     
It sounds almost frightening. Will the train definitely be in Moscow as it is supposed to be? You do know the risks, I suppose?
      “We were in touch with a professor of the School of Economics and Business Administration, who is an expert in trade with Russia and Russia’s rail system”, Everi answers and gives assurances that this is all quite safe.
     
One aim of the travel project is to increase knowledge about the Aalto University, says Mikko Ikola, a student of information technology, who has been planning the project from the very beginning. Above all, the trip is being made for the students themselves.
      “The trip itself is going to be as important as the destination”, Ikola says.
      On the train there will be instruction in Aalto University courses, and there will also be workshops of sponsor companies, for instance. Support has come from companies and foundations.
      Without the assistance from the likes of Nokia, YIT, Kone, Outotec, and Nokia Siemens Networks, the cost for the travellers themselves would be twice what it is now.
      As it is, the passengers on the "Aalto on Tracks" excursion will pay around EUR 1,000 each for the train ride, and arrange their own return - flights back from China are not included in the price.
     
The trip partially overlaps with an examination week. “However, there will be exams on the train”, Ikola says.
      He adds that simply organising the trip has been a very educational experience. Organisational responsibilities have been divided among those who are going. Many have done small things to help the trip, and possibly managed to secure a small discount to the price of their ticket.
     
It sounds like problem-based studying - a method that has been used in studying medicine, for instance. The starting point in this is a real problem in real life.
      Such as - how to get to Shanghai by train.
     
The Aalto University travellers will spend a night and a full day in Beijing, hosted and guided by students of the local Tsinghua University.
      “It’s kind of like China’s MIT”, says Ikola.
      MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the world’s top universities in the field.
      “It is tremendously valuable to know people like that”, Ikola says. Students are international people, but this kind of a visit to a Chinese university is still unusual, Ikola says.
     
Ikola already got to know students at Tsinghua University during a student union visit to China.
      International relations can even be the most valuable part of the trip. Even at university, the greatest benefit is usually getting to know people.
     
Sitting in a train is a slow way to travel.
      The party left Helsinki on the 14th of May and arrive in Shanghai on the 23rd. The private train takes them from Moscow to the Chinese border through Mongolia, and then they bus into Beijing and head on to Shanghai, again by train.
      Ponderous it may be, but the trip also implements a basic idea of the Aalto University, which is that students of different fields come into contact with each other, when they spend a week in the same train carriages.
      It is just like in the days when people would travel to the United States as exchange students, crossing the Atlantic on a ship, allowing the students from different countries to innovate on board until their eyes turned red.
      “It is often hard for young people to visualise their expertise - what they are studying and why. When people end up in contact with other fields of study, their own identity inevitably clears up”, says Kalevi Ekman, director of the Design Factory of the Aalto University. Ekman is one of the participants in the great trek to Shanghai.
     
Although the new university has been set up with much fanfare, technology students, economics students, and industrial art students have continued to spend most of their time among themselves, because the university does not have a single campus of its own.
      Might a train school be a plausible solution?
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.5.2010


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OLAVI KOISTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
olavi.koistinen@hs.fi