Mirkka Lappalainen has been in posts teaching Finnish and Nordic history at the University of Helsinki since 2001. As a teacher, she finds the Socratic method essential for guiding her students.

– It’s great to get the students to engage with history – what it is and how it is researched. Naturally, not all students will become historians, but the discipline does teach a lot about information retrieval, writing and perhaps, most important of all, the skills you need to make sense of the world.

Lappalainen is interested in all teaching arrangements and methods. Whether it’s lecturing, guiding a seminar or the personal supervision of written work, it will be the students’ active engagement in discussions that keeps the teacher fresh and alert.

– For example, in teaching work guiding undergraduate seminars is rewarding. Over the years there have been all kinds of students, topics and source materials. And even if the academic work is at a basic level, it still involves genuine research material. It’s very rewarding to discuss with students what they can investigate on the basis of their material and what research methods are best suited to the task.

When Lappalainen herself began studying in the aftermath of the deep recession in the 90s, the prospects for future employment seemed bleak. However she doesn’t remember being particularly worried about her employability or agonising with study mates over career plans. Twenty-first century students are much more clued up about what lies ahead. Nevertheless, plenty can happen during the years at university; so it’s quite understandable that uncertainty about your employment prospects will hit you at some point. Mirkka Lappalainen is keen to impress on students the message that life after the ‘big push’ is not worth fretting over too much until you get there.

– Studying history equips you for just about anything, much depending on what you choose to study as a subsidiary subject, how you network and what kind of internships you apply for. Time spent abroad during your studies and leisure activities and involvement in student organisations are all important formative experiences. As a fresher there’s no way you can know what all the options are, or will be. The people I was studying with have ended up doing all kinds of things.