I am not at all sure I can pick one specific event as my very best memory from the University of Helsinki, so I will offer here a couple of very positive experiences.

Before my appointment as assistant professor of English language in 1987, I gave a sample lecture towards the end of the application process, with the members of the selection committee included in the audience. The sample lecture left a lasting imprint in my memory not because it was accepted but for an entirely different reason. Above all, this memory is particularly warm because the selection committee evaluating the lecture included the late professor Ossi Ihalainen and the now professor emeritus Matti Rissanen, both of whom were even then successful scholars and were both interested in and above all understanding of my lecture. This was especially evident in the fact that the detailed questions they both asked, which I was able to answer even with my scarce experience, were asked not out of necessity but because my lecture had been thought provoking.

Another very pleasing memory is related to the doctoral defence of a postgraduate student of mine, Hanna Niemelä, at the beginning of 2003. Hanna was preparing for her defence and was duly a little nervous. Consequently, she asked me how she could smoothly start the event on her part, without any hesitation or other difficulties. I then proceeded to give her a piece of advice which I had received years before from my then professor Susumu Kuno, while studying at Harvard.

Susumu had invited me and a few other doctoral students, dates included, for dinner at his home. At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to presentation skills, at which juncture Susumu remarked that he had noticed the following effective way of engaging the audience: when the event begins and you step onto the podium, calmly take a firm grip on the edges of the lectern and look at the audience from side to side without saying a word for a few seconds. A large part of the audience will feel that the silence is particularly long and will feel slightly anxious when the speaker fails to say anything for four, five seconds but simply casts a critical gaze over the audience, albeit smiling, like a cattle buyer at market. When the speaker eventually begins (after about four or five seconds), the audience will feel a sense of relief in noticing that things are after all progressing in the expected manner.

I told Hanna that I had tested this in my own doctoral defence and that it had worked rather excellently and that she should employ the same tactic. When Hanna’s defence began, she did as I had advised and happily told me immediately after the defence that it “worked nicely”. This, too, is a part of the academic tradition at Helsinki…