Ready and set to advice

Our advisor arrived despite the winterstorms of January 2022 – but a whole week later.

Pauliina is originally from Finland, but she has lived in many different Nordic countries before. She’s lived in Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Denmark and Åland. And this isn’t her first time living in Greenland. She lived here in Nuuk for about half a year around 2019/2020.

While living in Greenland, she worked as an intern in NAPA, where she, among other things, got to work with the Culture Funding Program, and other funding programs.

– Language, culture, and Nordic collaboration are some of my biggest interests. And I also work as a translator, while I also dream about writing books, says Pauliina.

The responsibility of an advisor

At NAPA, Pauliina primarily works with everything that has to do with the funding programs. This includes NAPAs Culture Funding Program, and the Nordic Arctic Co-operation Program. In this she meets the people who wishes to apply both personally, and through Zoom. She also answers the applicants questions and gives them advice through mail and calls.

– Advising goes two ways. I don’t make any decisive decisions but read applications and rapports. Then I send them on for final assessment with some comments. I also deal with some minor financial tasks. Apart from that, I also pay attention to what other institutes are doing and check to see what other funding opportunities exists in the other Nordic countries, says Pauliina.

Her responsibilities as an advisor, also means that she has to have good skills in communication and have a clear understanding of how the funding schemes in NAPA work.

– I have to meet with a variety of people and be able to explain the application processes in a way that, everyone can understand. I also need to have a clear understanding of the type of projects, that NAPA would want to fund. That way, I’ll be able to give better advice to the applicants. And it will help me provide the right comments to the director about the different projects that we get for assessments. This is my first full-time job as an advisor. But I have a background in customer-service and some self-employment, and I think it is a good match for this job! Pauliina says, as she finishes explaining.

A linguistic advisor

Pauliina has several languages under her belt. She can speak Finnish, Swedish, Danish, and English. She is even in the process of learning Greenlandic! Her interest in languages started back in high school, where they had read about nordic themes during class.

– I discovered that, if one gets really good at Swedish, they’d be able to understand Norwegian, Danish and even a bit of Icelandic and Faroese. How cool is that! I then tried to live in different nordic countries and learn their languages to test the theory. It has worked pretty well. But Greenlandic is in a completely separate language-group and is then, in turn, harder for me to learn. But! For once, my native language is actually helping me when it comes to grammar! Says Pauliina in the end.