University of Lapland

The University of Lapland is an international, multidisciplinary university whose profile as an Arctic and Northern science and art university has steadily become stronger. Today the institution is home to strong faculties of Art and Design, Education, Law, and Social Sciences. The University’s state of the art research centre, the Arctic Centre, conducts internationally recognized, cutting-edge research on the interaction between people and the environment in the Arctic. Multidimensional Tourism Institute operates under the auspices of the University of Lapland.
The University’s strategic foci are sustainable development, law and justice; Northern well-being, education and work; responsible tourism; and culture-centred service design. International co-operation is highly valued at the University of Lapland which can be seen, for example, in its numerous co-operative agreements with universities in more than 40 different countries. The University has strong strategic partnerships with universities in Scandinavia, Europe, Russia, North America, China, and Japan.
The northern research-based higher education institution offers students and scholars the opportunity to pursue academic excellence at all levels – all the way up to PhD studies – in the fields of arctic issues, tourism, art and design, law, education, and the social sciences.
It is essential to the University of Lapland that the research, educational, and artistic activities actively support the local community, business life, and the society in northern Finland. The efforts do not end there, however: the work is relevantly geared wider in Finland and the globalised world.
Despite its somewhat peripheral location, the University of Lapland has been leading the statistics regarding incoming international mobility students in Finnish universities. The student body at the University of Lapland amounts to approximately 5,000 degree students, of which the proportion of outgoing exchange students from the University of Lapland is significant. According to student feedback, the ULapland community forms a genuinely international learning environment.
Maintaining a genuine sense of internationalisation continues to be a vital quality for the University of Lapland; the aims of this project support the implementation of the ULapland internationalisation programme.
The Language Centre is in charge of teaching languages and communication skills at the University of Lapland. Founded in 1983, the Language Centre is responsible for planning and implementing teaching of languages, cultures, and communication skills in accordance with curricula and the degree system and in accordance with the needs of various disciplines. In addition to compulsory language and communication studies, the Language Centre has a wide selection of minor subject courses and elective courses starting from the elementary level. The Language Centre is also actively involved in various co-operation networks and projects focusing on languages and communication, and it has recently successfully participated in the E-LOCAL project and the E-LOCAL for all project, for example. In addition, the unit is home to internal translation and proofreading services.