I had always gone to Swedish-speaking schools, so it was natural that I would apply for a Swedish-speaking subject at the university. My history grades had been good, thanks to Sibbo upper secondary school’s excellent history teacher, Magnus Perret, so I applied for the Swedish language subject of Finnish and Scandinavian History at the University of Helsinki.

I remember the feeling of dread and confusion during my first days and lectures as a fresher. I felt understood nothing; there was an enormous amount to read, and everyone else was better-read than I was – I would probably have quit that instant if a friend of mine from school hadn’t started the same year. I had just moved from the countryside to Helsinki, and everything was new. People thought my dialect was funny, and when we visited the House of Nobility and half my study mates pointed at their families’ coats of arms, I stared and blinked. Despite it all, I formed a strong bond with the students on the introductory course and later with the student association for history students, Historicus, whose chairman I was in 1992. Those bonds kept me tightly at the university. Many of the people I studied with back then are still my close friends.

I had heard that should you be offered small tasks or jobs by teachers, you should always take them. So, when Docent Rainer Knapas was searching for someone to do transcriptions, I volunteered. I was placed in the storage room of the Renvall Institute and given a tall pile of typed papers, which I was to enter onto a computer using a modern word-processing program, and “the publisher’s programs would somehow do the layout later.” In 1989, Word Perfect taught me what ADP was.

In 1990, I took part in a journal-editing course organised by the student union. The course was held in a room reeking of cigarettes called Konehuone (‘The machine room’) at the New Student Building, where they had bought shiny new Macs. I soon bought my own computer, and most of the time I was working on one student publication or another. When our student association’s 30-year jubilee history was finished and I swore at five in the morning on the day of printing, after a long night of hard work, that this was the last deadline of my life, Derek Fewster, a slightly older study mate laughed through his beard and simply stated that “Mika, du kommer alltid att ha med deadlines att göra! (Mika, you will always have something to do with deadlines!)”

When I submitted my Master’s thesis on a sunny spring day in 1994, my Professor immediately remarked that the department would not allow any further emphasis on layout design. I took his advice and went on to continue layout design elsewhere.