I was 17 when I completed my first university degree, with highest honours. Ever since I was young, learning has always been one of my main motivations. Reading, thinking, writing, and discussing. Trying to understand myself and the world.

My education has taken me to nine different institutions in six countries across two continents thus far. Now I am completing two master's degrees at the University of Helsinki; one in Atmospheric Sciences and the other in European and Nordic Studies. Nordic Studies is my main focus at the moment, especially my autoethnographic research on Laestadianism and Finnish American culture. I plan to graduate in summer 2025 and then continue my academic career as a doctoral researcher.

In the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, my family moved from Taivalkoski, Ylitornio, Vaasa, and Åland to Minnesota and California. Like many others, they left for better lives and the hope of a brighter future. Many of my ancestors were part of the pietist Lutheran revival movement launched by Lars Levi Laestadius, a Swedish-Sami botanist and priest, in the Tornio River Valley in the 1840s. Others converted in the United States. In 2014, I gained an opportunity to study and live at a folk high school in Ranua connected to the movement – a chance to become acquainted with my Finnish heritage and explore whether Conservative Laestadianism was right for me. Over the course of that year, I came to the conclusion that it was not. After formally exiting the Conservative Laestadian movement the following autumn, I wanted nothing to do with the entire topic for several years. I experienced shunning by previously close family members and the loss of nearly my entire community of origin. With the space of time and distance, and healing work including depth psychotherapy, I more recently became interested in again engaging in the topics that have affected so much of my life and experience – Finnish migration to the United States and Conservative Laestadianism. In my current autoethnographic research, I am mainly studying shunning practices within Conservative Laestadianism and the movement's development into an exclusivist and fundamentalist belief system. I am also considering insights from Nordic studies and history, cognitive science of religion, and psychology of religion to better understand the movement.

I am currently working on my master's thesis on these themes and plan to continue the topic as a doctoral researcher after graduating in summer 2025.