Growing campus in focus at Aalto town hall meeting

Aalto town hall provides a forum, led by President Ilkka Niemelä, to meet new and old colleagues and reflect on current issues within our community. This time the focus was on our growing campus, as well as the current decisions made by the Aalto Board. 

Sari Dhima from Aalto ARTS and Perttu Kähäri from Aalto BIZ shared the latest updates on the moving projects of the two schools. The School of Arts, Design and Architecture will move already during the summer to Väre, where Aalto Day One is celebrated with the whole community on 5 September. Opening in connection with the Aalto University metro station, the new shopping centre A Bloc will serve Otaniemi with its restaurants, retail shops and other services from the end of August. The School of Business on the other hand is preparing to move to its new premises in around half a year. “Operating together on the same campus offers a lot of good opportunities for cooperation. It’s a pleasure to get to know the whole Aalto community and we’ll see what kind of interesting projects we’ll come up with!” Kähäri said. 

Ilkka Niemelä talked about the renewed planning model of Aalto University, which includes strategic and financial plans for both core activities and services. Plans are now made for the next four years, and also the annual cycle has been advanced. “Long-term planning better supports the time-span required for academic work, and advanced process allows us to start recruitment and procurement decisions well before the beginning of the year.”

Chief Financial Officer Marianna Bom lifted up the Digital Aalto program as one significant project in next year’s budget. The program aims at digitalizing all operational fields of Aalto. Furthermore, Bom told that the targets of the financial balancing plan made for a three-year period have already been met now after two years. We will have ambitious goals for diversifying the funding base and for fund-raising also in the future. 

“Aalto is doing really well in many indicators – for example, we were just estimated as the 9th best young university in the world according to QS Ranking. I want to thank everyone at Aalto for such great work again this spring!”, Ilkka Niemelä concluded.

Photos: Mikko Raskinen