A summer filled with networking and great experiences

Hello! We are Roosa, Laura and Jaakko. When we started our journey as Summer Trainees at Tampere Financial Control together in May, we had no idea what the summer here had in store for us. In this article, we share our experiences and our key takeaways from this summer here. But first, who are we?

Roosa and Jaakko are both starting their fifth year majoring in accounting, Roosa at Tampere University and Jaakko at the University of Vaasa. Laura majors in accounting too and is finishing up her master’s thesis at Oulu Business School. In her free time, Roosa is into sports and takes part actively in her student association. Jaakko does sports actively during his free time as well as likes to watch football and ice-hockey. Laura is especially into cross-country skiing and running. We all wanted to apply to UPM as it is a big multicultural company, and we were fascinated by its clear passion for a sustainable future. Before our summer here we were all familiar with UPM, but eager to learn more and see what it is like to work in such a large finance organization.

We spent the first weeks of onboarding in May together as we learned about the ways of working and got to know all the UPM businesses better. It was nice to learn about the different functions inside the organization and the people working here. As the weeks went by, we split into different teams and started focusing on our individual tasks in different areas of the UPM businesses. All of us had tasks related to the financial closing process as well as monthly recurring tasks such as statistics inquiries. In addition, Roosa’s tasks included for example asset accounting and monthly mill reporting, and Laura’s tasks consisted of reporting delivery and production figures and monitoring different accounts and profit centres. Jaakko focused on VAT related tasks such as checking monthly VAT positions of all UPM companies in Finland.

Roosa, Laura and Jaakko - summer trainees from Tampere

Networking and learning about career opportunities

Even though we split up to different teams, we remained very much in touch as we all liked to work at the office.

By working at the office, we also got the opportunity to chat and network with other summer trainees and professionals outside our own teams and inside the finance organization.

For example, Jaakko who is very into forestry and the forest industry, got to familiarize himself with the business control side in UPM Forest by getting to know one of their business controllers in Tampere. Likewise, Roosa got the chance to meet with the responsibility team in Tampere and hear about their work, as she has studied responsible business and is really interested in corporate social responsibility reporting. It was fun getting to know professionals from different teams and hearing about their career paths and opportunities for developing expertise UPM has to offer.

Besides our everyday work, we have gotten to participate in various team activities and thus gotten to know our colleagues better. These activities have been for example team lunches and team sessions where we get to hang out with our teammates in a more relaxed environment and get to know each other through fun games. In addition, we got to participate in UPM’s Summer Event.

One of the true highlights of our summer was our visit to the Tervasaari Paper Mill where we got to see in real life how paper is being manufactured. Oh, how hot it was standing next to the large machine.

During this summer, we got visitors from Helsinki as we met with our summer trainee colleagues from the group finance team. At the end of the summer, we also paid a visit to the Biofore House in Helsinki where we got to meet even more colleagues

Overall, we have had an eventful summer filled with possibilities. We have enjoyed the opportunity to get to know a large organization and its daily procedures and tasks as well as getting to know and learning from experts in different teams and businesses of the organization.

Let’s wait and see what the future holds for us three!

A summer filled with networking and great experiences

Networking and learning about career opportunities

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