When I signed up for a summer course in Finland called Machine Learning and Stochastic Control, I could confidently define exactly one of those four words. Machine learning, fine. Stochastic control? No idea what it meant. I applied anyway and hoped I would work it out on the way.
The first few days, I understood maybe forty percent of each lecture in the room. The other sixty percent I copied down word for word so I could decode it that night in my room. That copying-and-decoding turned out to be the real skill of the trip. Not the maths. The ability to sit in a lecture hall as the least-prepared person there and stay in the chair anyway.
There were students from all over, people I had met that same week, and by the end of it strangers had turned into the group you eat every meal with. I had a paper coffee cup from the student restaurant that said “Better food. Better thinking.” I drank a lot from it.
Then I did something slightly unhinged. After the course I solo-travelled five countries in fifteen days: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Estonia. Trains, one ferry, a lot of walking, and one quiet afternoon picking wild blueberries straight off the low bushes in a Finnish forest, which I did not know you were just allowed to do.
I went for the machine learning. What actually stuck with me was smaller and harder to put on a CV. I found out I could drop myself into a place where I knew nobody and could not read the signs, and be okay. Miss a connection and not spiral. Sit with not-knowing for a whole afternoon and trust that it resolves. That trip is the reason a future spent working and studying across borders stopped feeling like a daydream and started feeling like a plan I was already halfway into.