Meet our Students

1. What is your full name?
Sami Petteri Liukkonen.

2. What country do you come from?
Finland.

3. What is your favorite place in Seattle?
As cheesy as it sounds, I really like the school. I guess in a way I have "persuaded" myself to like it because I spend so much time there. I also really like Volunteer Park - in Finland we have a lot of forests, parks and trees, and its hard to find a spot in Seattle where you can't see or hear cars.

4. What do you enjoy most about Seattle Central?
The friendly, international atmosphere. I really like the fact that almost half (can it be half?) of the students I meet are international students, either from Europe, Asia or even South America and Africa.

5. What are your plans for the future?
Most probably I'll try to finish my Web Design AAS degree with the best grades possible (want it to look good on my resume, of course), and then move back to Finland and find a job in a web development or IT field.

6. What are the biggest differences between life in your country and life in Seattle?
Well, leaving behind friends and family was a big thing. It was also hard to get my head around the new customs and ways of doing simple things (like paying the fare on a bus, or answering phones), so there was a kind of threshold for me to start doing things I used to do every day in Finland.

7. What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments? Why?
I consider my biggest accomplishment to be my integration with the American society. Honestly speaking, it wasn't as hard as I thought (as the Finnish and the American cultures are more similar than I thought earlier), and it happened almost automatically. Aside from that, getting a job on campus (as the web master of the International Education Programs) was awesome - mainly because I got it because I came highly recommended by the teachers - and getting the full year's tuition scholarship was really nice as it in a way proved to me that I had done a good job at school.

8. What do you consider to be an interesting fact about you?
Well, one more or less interesting tidbit is that in Finland all men have a mandatory military service (6 months). In the recent years, civilian service (13 months) has become an alternative option to that, and because of my personal views on war I decided my place during war-time would be helping the civilian population. So I spent a little over a year as a teacher's assistant in an elementary school in my hometown. It proved to be a wonderful experience, as I really like teaching.

9. What are your hobbies?
I'm obsessed with roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons, the one everyone has heard of). I do something related to them every day, and usually devote one day of every weekend to playing with my friends. They are such an interesting combination of creative writing, acting and strategy, I can't think of anything I'd rather spend my time doing.

10. What were you doing prior to coming to Seattle to study at Seattle Central?
I was a programmer trainee in a Finnish software company when I first came to visit Seattle (at which point I had no intention of studying here). I really liked Seattle however, and figured out a way to come here and study at Seattle Central. At first I didn't know what I wanted to study, but during my first quarter here I took an introductory class about web authoring and got really excited about it - and so it became my major.