Thoughts about summer - #KESÄIMATRALLA conclusion

I am Riina Tanskanen, communication intern of the city of Imatra, and I love Imatra with all my heart. I love it, despite the fully aware shortcomings - new ideas land here usually a few years late and the districts are as small as Koskenparta's main street. Of course, the limited number of patterns is sometimes distressing. Having grown up all your life in a reasonably small town, the people you grew up with know pretty well what was there five or ten years ago, and the impression you got in middle school will never go away from people's minds.

However, there is an asset called community spirit hidden in the small patterns. On the streets of big cities, you can walk in peace without fear of the good day coming around the corner, but at the same time, the environment makes a person invisible. Inattention in itself is not bad if a person perceives it as an advantage, but its flip side is a feeling of insignificance. Smallness, on the other hand, makes everything more personal; From the back seat of a van-sized bus, you can hear the drivers talking very well, and it is not unusual to see a basket of apples in the mailbox, with a note pasted on it that says "You can take it!"

To me, Imatra means above all community and doing things together, and it has been great to notice that this is also visible in the spirit of the town hall during the summer. When a bunch of fangirls camped out in front of the town hall to wait for Robin's gig, they were taken care of by the whole house; first we lamented the chilly weather for camping in the coffee room and then gave the girls chocolate bars decorated with Imatra stickers and raincoats. It seemed simple - a group of young people queuing up for a gig was a rare event and of course they should be remembered somehow, but the girls themselves said in their customer feedback that they received a rare kind of friendly treatment.

We from Imatra have been blessed with madness, with the power of which we organize three music festivals alone during July and we still believe in what we do as hard as the paper industry. While doing the #KESÄIMATRALLA campaign, I got to talk to wonderful young people, all of whom reflected the fire of Imatra-ness in their own way. Despite the limitations of a small town, Imatra has young people who have the courage to push council initiatives for gender-neutral toilets and the desire to strengthen Imatra's hip-hop culture - no matter how absurd it sounds compared to our accustomed norms.

The infantilism that sprinkles in the young is a resource for the future and therefore it should be nurtured. My craziness has been fed, for which I can thank Imatra co-ed high school the most, and when I next go to study literature in Tampere, I will be accompanied by an extremely strong feeling that I am enough and I will manage. In addition to high school, my summer work as a communication intern in the city of Imatra has given me skills for the future - albeit a little different than I initially thought. It felt incredible to get to know the "jobs in the field" before you even had time to start your studies, but now after my internship, I understand that I have learned the most from the world of adults.

The rules of working life, power structures and operating cultures in a large organization seemed more difficult to understand than any subject ever, and to top it all off, no adult will chew them open already, but you have to notice everything yourself. Instead, adults suddenly became equal colleagues. In particular, the school world has gotten used to the idea that all adults are somehow in a position of authority, which is why it is easy to relate to adults in general. At first, I was alienated from the new situation, but after recovering from the initial excitement, I started to learn to relate to adults as – well – people, and today I'm almost moderate in coffee-room small talk.

My summer at Imatra was mainly spent at the office working on the #SUMMER IMATRA campaign, and I couldn't have asked for a better job. The formerly large and square city hall has started to feel like home, and I miss the dinner hours, when horoscopes were analyzed and when I updated how I could be the child or grandchild of the other table companions. When I applied for the position of communications intern, I pushed myself so hard that I couldn't help but admire if someone else had been chosen, and I aim to continue on the same line throughout the summer. I don't seem to know how to do things other than to my full potential, because before the summer job I gave my all equally to matriculation papers and entrance exams. After a rough start, a few weeks' vacation is finally looming, and now I can say with satisfaction that I'm the last day as a communications intern in the city of Imatra.