Internships are an important part of business studies in Lapland University of Applied sciences. International Business students are often interested in doing their internship in a Finnish company in Lapland. International students not only learn about the field of business they get to work on but also the Lappish culture. For an entrepreneur, having a trainee is a great way of getting help and knowledge on developing one’s business.

My name is Laura Tyimofejev, and this is my 3rd year at Lapland UAS as an International Business student. Being a foreigner in Lapland is hard in terms of finding jobs. Therefore, finding internships where you don’t necessarily need Finnish language skills is also hard.

But luckily you can find entrepreneurs whom you can help and learn from. In my case I’m doing my internship at Riia Valvimo’s company, which she has been running for two years as a solopreneur at Rovaniemi. Valvimo – Happy marketing agency is focused on helping other businesses to improve their marketing.

For me it was quite interesting to get to know the Finnish working ethics and how businesses work here in Finnish Lapland. I’m happy that I have the opportunity to do my internship remotely from my home country Hungary. Luckily marketing is a field of business where it’s quite easy to work from abroad and still be efficient with the work tasks.

I’ve not only had the happy entrepreneur Riia Valvimo but also a Finnish business student Riika Saastamoinen to collaborate with. In our mutual communications we use English. I think there are no problems working with a Finnish student even though the language tricks us sometimes, but we managed to work efficiently.

Finding out the collaboration opportunities


During my internship Riia got the opportunity to work on a project for Lapland UAS and as interns we also got the opportunity to help her with it. The project aims to find out how Lapland UAS could help and support IB-students to get employed, find internships, collaborate with local companies, or become entrepreneurs in the Lapland region. I’ve been assisting in this project by doing research, reaching out to people, helping to plan surveys, and the list goes on.

I’m happy to invite English speaking entrepreneurs in the Lapland region to answer our survey which aims to find out the possibilities of collaboration between students and companies. Answer the survey here: Link to the survey

Joyful regards
Laura Tyimofejev