Helsinki (2005). Photo by Aki Kärkkäinen.
Helsinki, Finland, 1991–1997 / 1998–1999
This article is Part Two of the series. See the bottom of this article for the other parts in this series.
After completing military service in 1991, I moved to Helsinki to play music and to study at the University of Helsinki. At the time, Linus Torvalds was a student there as well - releasing that same year the initial version of Linux.
However, without dissing anyone or anything here, I thought computer science was extremely boring, so I quit after 4 months. The point is that 1990s in Helsinki was a period of exploration for me, a decade when I continued pursuing my dreams with my first love from the 80s: Music. I went on to study at the Sibelius Academy Jazz Department.
By the end of that decade, after many both extremely rewarding and challenging years of studying and working in music & teaching, I decided to put music on hold, and pursue a career in the Web. Perhaps technology was a new way to be creative, while working with groups of people, towards greater good? Perhaps it had evolved into something more interesting than what I saw in 1991? I wanted to find out. That meant moving back to my hometown to study information systems, human-computer interaction and economics at the University of Jyväskylä.
I don't have so many digital photographs from Helsinki to choose from, so this one from 2005 will have to do :)