Daryl Chapman, a senior lecturer in management at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences tells how he ended up in Finland and furthermore into Metropolia.

“Like most foreigners, I didn’t necessarily plan to come to Finland. I travelled with a friend to the island of Kos, in Greece in the late 1980’s. There, we met a group of Finnish people. I had never met Finnish people in my life before. Later in that particular year (1988), I went on a short holiday to Finland, for just two weeks. After that I returned to London and worked there for three more years. I always considered Finland as a possible place to move to. At some point in the early 1990’s, I decided on a career change and so I applied to a firm that offered training to business executives in Europe. My original intention at the interview was to start working at their office in Lisbon, Portugal. However, the interviewer, after noticing that I was widely travelled on my CV and had been to Finland, asked me to forget about Lisbon and start thinking about Helsinki, because they were in great need of trainers there. So the company offered me a one year contract and an apartment in Ullanlinna in Helsinki as part of the package.

I got interested in the possibilities of teaching offered when I was training business people in Finland. To Metropolia I came as a result of a series of merger processes between institutions. After I extended my contract for two additional years with the company that originally brought me to Finland, I had a look around at what else was possible. I noticed an advertisement in the National Newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat) in which there was a small business school in Vantaa that wanted people to lecture in English on a range of business related subjects. Later on I applied and I got the job. That was Mercuria Business School, that had a merger with an institute called EVTEK, which in turn was the forerunner to Metropolia Business School.”