MSc Baltic Sea Studies! The course everyone thinks you are doing!

What is BSRS? Why BSRS? What is the point of BSRS?

A triumvirate of questions of which you may laugh at, gasp at or think irrelevant to yourselves as students on the MA Baltic Sea Region Studies programme.

Think again! Quiz any current or former member of the small but proud BSRS department fraternity, and they will smile and tell you that these questions are three of the most popular questions one gets asked when explaining your choice of studies here at Turku University.

As the title above suggests, you are often initially placed into the category of Science student, due to the “mishear” that is the title of our course.  People hear Baltic Sea Region Studies and automatically eliminate the ‘region’ part for reasons still unclear to my good self, and then immediately have you pegged down as a budding hotshot marine biologist who is out to become the David Attenborough of the Baltic Region.  And as appealing and financially rewarding as this sounds, you must then gently let them down explaining your love of the humanities and social sciences.

Now that you have established yourself as a lover of social sciences and humanities with a penchant for essay writing over lab experiments, the questions above come at you rapid-fire like a news reporter who is still looking for ways to explain your first answer.

I must confess a dash of hyperbole may have been used throughout, but if esteemed students and colleagues within the academic family are asking the questions above, a safe bet would be that future employers will be asking the same questions also.

So think hard on what you are studying, why you are studying BSRS, and what is the point of you studying BSRS!

With the experience of my first year of studies over, I will give my own insight into this trio of questions and offer up my answers to them in my next blog…

© Pravin Bjarni Ramdin