First steps of a new degree student

You will receive an email with your letter of admission and instructions for accepting the study place offered to you. If you do not follow the instructions and fail to accept the place on offer by the deadline, you will lose your place. The deadline will be specified in the same email message.

After accepting your study place, you must also register as an attending or non-attending student at the University. Your letter of admission will be accompanied by registration instructions. You will lose the right to study granted to you if you fail to register by the deadline.

If you are liable to pay tuition fees, you will be automatically registered after you have paid your tuition fee.

You can register as non-attending during the first academic year only in situations specified in section 39 of the Universities Act, i.e. if you're completing Finnish military service, non-military service, or voluntary military service for women; taking maternity, paternity or parental leave or are prevented from beginning your studies owing to a medical condition.

If you have been accepted conditionally, you need to prove your eligibility separately. If you have not yet proved your eligibility for Bachelor’s or Master’s studies, you will also be emailed instructions for doing so. You can find the conditional acceptance either from My Studyinfo website, the e-mail sent to you by Admissions services or from another specified website. You will lose the place offered to you if you fail to prove your eligibility by the deadline. The deadline will be specified in the same email message or website which will be sent to you.

Once you have accepted your study place and registered as an attending or non-attending student, your information will be saved in the University’s student register Sisu.

You can then obtain a certificate of student status to prove, when necessary, that you are a student of the University of Helsinki. You can get a digitally signed transcript with your attendance information from Sisu after you have been enrolled at the University as attending and you have received your IT account username (please see “Activate your user account” below). We recommend having the digital version of the certificate of student status on your phone, but also that you bring one printed copy with you.

If necessary, you can also collect a certificate of student status from Student Services.

All attending students are given an IT username to the University's network. Most public computers on the campuses as well as the University's wireless network require you to log in with your username and password. The access right includes a username and password, an email address, disk space on a server and access to various programs.

Please note that you cannot use the University’s data systems (e.g. register for courses or print a digitally signed transcript) until you have activated your user account. Activating the account online requires a Finnish e-banking account or an electronic user ID and a card reader. If you don’t have a Finnish bank account, fill out an application for user account and email it to Helpdesk. After your application has been processed, you will receive a notification to visit a Helpdesk ID point personally or instructions for a video identification. 

If the activation of user accounts is not possible in July, the reason may be a technical challenge related to the registration of study rights (for example, in the case of students not attending due to a statutory reason or Open University students). In this case, the account can be activated starting on 1 August or in urgent cases by contacting Helpdesk.

For detailed instructions for activating your account, please see Helpdesk's instructions. You can also read more about the IT services offered by the University of Helsinki on Helpdesk's page for new students.

As a member of the University of Helsinki Student Union (HYY), you will be able to get a Finnish student card which is your means of proving that you're a student in Finland in all situations necessary.

Once your information has been saved in the student register, you can download Frank App on your smartphone and activate your digital student card. The digital student card provides all the same student benefits (e.g. discounts at UniCafe, public transportation HSL, the Finnish Student Health Service FSHS and UniSport) as the traditional plastic card. You can begin to use Frank App as of 1 August, i.e., when your right to study begins. Once you have received your personal identity code (see "Re­gis­ter with the au­thor­it­ies"), inform it to the Student Services and re-load the Frank App to synchronize it with the new information in the University’s database.

You can also order a plastic student card.

As a member of the Student Union, you will also receive a student calendar. You can collect your calendar from the Kaisa Library service desk, the Meilahti, Kumpula or Viikki campuses, or the HYY service point.

All newsletters for international students are available here. If you haven't received the newsletter but you are a new student, please check your junk mail.