The Song Festival Is Sacred for Estonians

Posted on June 30, 2014 by Inga Külmoja
Song Festival in Estonia

The singing nation at the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn. Image credit: Endel Grensmann and Rainar Kurbel

Estonians are counting the days left until the start of the national song and dance celebration in Tallinn on 4–6 July. A whopping 96 per cent of Estonians surveyed in a sociological study led by UT Professor of Social Communication Marju Lauristin and Senior Media Researcher Peeter Vihalemm consider the song celebration important. Moreover, two-thirds of the total 1301 respondents – a representative sample of the Estonian-speaking population aged between 15–74 – deem the celebration very important.

This is no surprise, as every second Estonian within the surveyed age range has previously been on stage in a song or dance celebration at least once. Two in three Estonians have attended such celebrations, and 90 per cent have followed them via TV or radio broadcast.

So what is the magic force driving people to the festival grounds? According to the survey, the top three incentives are: national tradition, a sense of national unity, and family members or friends performing.

The ‘Singing Nation’ is not a mere metaphor. I would say that the Song Festival Grounds gather Estonia’s biggest congregation with common sacred values. Surely, some have said that the Song Festival’s time is over. However, the survey has clearly indicated that for the majority of young and old Estonians alike, the Song Festival is a celebration where Estonian people gather to experience together our essential values, and feel that they belong to a community, a congregation. Participation in the festival is an extremely important common departure from the everyday routine towards values that bond us with the past. It is close to a religious feeling. The survey has shown that Estonians have a great need for the sacred, and it feeds upon this tradition.

UT Professor Marju Lauristin

The top 5 festival experiences

The festival programme can seem overwhelming and picking events to attend hard. If you were wondering what the must-see things would be, look no further. Here are the top five experiences as seen by Estonians themselves (look for more in the survey report, page 5): Continue reading →

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Cum Laude Graduate Marina Gets a Head Start on Career

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Inga Külmoja

Marina Pukeliene is a fresh cum laude graduate of the master’s programme in EU-Russia studies at the University of Tartu. Her name is related to the sea, and she comes from Klaipeda, a seaport city in Lithuania.

MA graduates of EU - Russia studies programme

Marina (second from the left) and her coursemates jumping from joy after receiving their Master’s defense grades. Image credit: SIlver Bohl.

What does it take to achieve a cum laude? It definitely requires a lot of work, but also love for the programme and your subject. Marina is grateful to her supervisor, Professor Viacheslav Morozov, who guided and helped her through the difficult stuff, and is happy about the true friendships that evolved during her studies in Tartu: “I was really lucky that my coursemates have become not only my colleagues but also my friends”.

Although excited about graduation, Marina admits she is also a little nervous. All her summer plans got reshuffled after she received a job offer from an NGO working with Russia. Instead of travelling merrily with her friends, she is now looking for an apartment to settle down in Tallinn. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Win Crimea and Pawn Siberia

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Rein Taagepera

Rein Taagepera, recipient of Skytte Prize 2008, is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Tartu, and the University of California, Irvine, USA.

It is still unclear who the winners and losers are in the recent events near the Black Sea – and to what degree. But China is a clear winner. The Chinese-Russian trade agreement had been in the works for ten years. Both sides were asking for more than the other side was willing to cede. Now Vladimir Putin went to Beijing, and the treaty came about. Putin hesitated, but 10 minutes before leaving he did sign. For such a dramatic breakthrough right now, someone had to yield and give up on demands firmly held for 10 years. Someone must have felt unusually vulnerable and badly in need of a treaty. It wasn’t China.

A Chinese takeover in Eastern Siberia was in the cards, anyway. The geo-demographic reality consists of 140 million Russians far away and one billion Chinese nearby. For different reasons, both sides have desisted from estimating how many thousand Chinese already work in the Russian Far East. But it is evident that quite a few Chinese are willing to toil there for wages the Russians would reject. Eventually, these Chinese will take over much of commerce, as they have in Southeast Asia. Now Putin has been forced to speed up this inevitable course.

Novosibirsk

Graffiti in Novosibirsk, Eastern Siberia says: “We want to live, not to survive.” Some people in Eastern Ukraine supported rebellion in the hopes of higher wages and pensions from Russia. Image credit: @thedimka / Flickr Creative Commons.

Some people in Lugansk and Donetsk supported rebellion in the hopes of higher wages and pensions, as they are in Russia, compared to Ukraine. – See more at: http://blog.ut.ee/?p=4106#sthash.fqHfQZRj.dpuf

Continue reading →

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The University of Tartu in 2032

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Signe Ivask

Signe Ivask, an editor at UT magazine, discusses the future of the University of Tartu with Professor of Media Studies Veronika Kalmus, Professor of Comparative Politics Vello Pettai, and Professor of International Relations Eiki Berg.

Main Building of the University of Tartu
The role of women in society will be significantly greater in 2032, including at the university and its top echelons, says Veronika Kalmus. “The percentage of professors who are women will be up to one-third, compared to the current one-fifth,” she forecasts. “The university will have had at least one female rector by 2032 and it will seem incredible that back around the turn of the millennium, some said in debates that the University of Tartu wasn’t ready for a woman to be rector.”

Kalmus adds that the percentage of female students will level off in the 2020s, because higher education will become so much the norm that young males without a diploma will have no other way of landing a decent job and being successful.

“In 2032, children born today will choose their major and enter university. My son, born in December, will be one of them,” says Kalmus. “Internationalisation will no longer be a development objective at the University of Tartu, as the process will have seen unprecedented acceleration in the 2020s due to the external environment, and about half the students will be foreign nationals.” Continue reading →

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Student Career Podcast: Myroslava at Fortumo

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Inga Külmoja

On 30 May 2014, the leading mobile payments provider Fortumo will keep their doors wide open for students. Today, we are taking a sneak peek at what it feels like to work at Fortumo with the help of their fresh employee, Myroslava Stavnycha, who is also a first-year master’s student of software engineering at the University of Tartu.

Myroslava Stavnycha

Myroslava on the day of our interview.

We meet on a warm sunny day and head to what used to be Tartu’s first photo lab in the university’s Old Anatomical Theatre for the interview. Myroslava is smiling. She is 21 and comes from Kiev, Ukraine. She is very open, smart, beautiful and sincere.

Myroslava’s department is pretty close to our interview spot — also offering beautiful views on Toome Hill and enjoying luxurious proximity to the town centre. It’s exam time. “I wish I could live without sleeping during this period”, jokes Myroslava, “but it’s OK; it’s not that hard at all”.

A month ago she landed her first ‘office job’, as she calls it, at Fortumo: “I had quite a lot of free time, so I could dedicate it to working on something useful”. How did she get the job? “Well, I knew that there were some job opportunities there because it was advertised a lot at the university”, Myroslava says.

She seems to enjoy Fortumo so far: “The atmosphere is warm and people are friendly. I like my team”. She goes on to praise her colleagues, who are willing to teach and guide her.

Myroslava says that she is not attached to any place, that all roads are open, everything is easy, and it’s just hard to decide where to go and live. She doubts that she is going back to live in Ukraine, but admits that a month or two ago her days started with reading the news and crying. Then she would call her relatives and friends to connect and share emotions.

It turns out that Myroslava’s name means ‘peace and glory’ in Ukrainian. That’s what we wish for Ukraine. And for Myroslava.

Listen to the podcast interview with Myroslava Stavnycha:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download


You are welcome to visit the Fortumo Open Doors Day on 30 May 2014!

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Health in 2032: Many Elderly People, But No Retirement

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Villu Päärt

What will health and medicine be like in 2032? University of Tartu Professor of Medical Microbiology and Virology Irja Lutsar, Professor of Biotechnology and Director of the Estonian Gene Bank Andres Metspalu, Professor of Psychophysiology Jaanus Harro, Professor of Pathological Physiology Sulev Kõks and Associate Professor of Andrology Margus Punab shared their thoughts.

In the spa

In 2032, the average life expectancy in Estonia will be 85 for women and 80 for men. There will be people with very healthy lifestyle, and those who just don’t care.

In 2032, Estonia will be home to slightly over 1.1 million people. What will healthcare and the medical profession in Estonia be like at this time?

Lutsar: Medicine will depend on how many taxpayers there are. If Estonia’s population trend remains below replacement rate, much will depend on the government’s immigration policy. If nothing changes in this regard, we’ll have many people over 60 who’ll inevitably be healthcare sector clients.

But import foreign labour, and these will be younger people who lack the health problems experienced by the elderly. They will need maternity care instead, for example.

Punab: Empathetic doctors will be the biggest deficit item in 2032.

Harro: Already now we’re in a situation where applying cutting-edge medical technologies to meet our needs would take up all of the GDP and then some.

We have a range of technologies that we consider essential and beneficial. It will take up our entire healthcare budget. Basically, we need to reconsider what is reasonable. It’s likely that in 2032, many things that we still consider reasonable now will no longer be seen that way. We’ll be forced to reappraise cost-effectiveness. We currently want longer life for everyone at all cost. At some point, though, we’ll probably need slightly more specific priorities. Continue reading →

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In Search of the True Estonian

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Martin Ehala

The future of being Estonian doesn’t depend solely on demographic trends. Our understanding of the essence of being Estonian is important as well. Martin Ehala, Professor of Literacy Education at the UT Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, sheds some light on the topic.

Song Festival in Tallinn

Mainly, it is thought that an Estonian is a person who speaks the Estonian language as a native tongue, loves Tammsaare, and feels greatly affected at the Song Festival. Image credit: Jarek Jõepera.

Not long ago, as I was visiting London, I spoke to a room full of teachers of Estonian language abroad. I told them that 50-90 percent of the world’s languages will probably become extinct during the 21st century. I followed with a question: If we’d line up all the languages in the world according to vitality, where would the Estonian language end up?

For about half of the listeners, the answer was: somewhere among the bottom 3000. The online version of the Postimees newspaper conducted a similar Gallup a few years ago with the results not being much better. As it turns out, a significant part of our fellow natives is peacefully going on with their lives, all the while thinking that the Estonian language is a lovely thing – but unfortunately too small, and thus destined to die out.

When one takes a look at the level of development of our language objectively, it takes a position among the few hundred most developed language cultures in the world. Estonian language functions as the national language and one of the official languages of the European Union. Estonia has an Estonian language-based educational system on all levels that meets the international standard, as well as a rich native tongue-based culture (journalism, poetry, prose, TV and radio programs, film). Estonian language-related technology is steadily progressing — creating language interfaces to computer programs, speech synthesis, and machine translation.

Based on the number of people speaking the language, Estonian is among the world’s largest 400, not the smallest 3000. To put it briefly, the average Estonian considers the Estonian language to be about ten times weaker than it really is. Continue reading →

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