The 11th Doctoral Conferment Ceremony of the University of Oulu was celebrated over the past weekend with all the traditional festivities: the sword-whetting on Friday, the ceremony proper on Saturday followed by a procession through city centre, an ecumenical service in Oulu Cathedral and the conferment banquet and ball, and finally the “sailing trip” (which, I am given to understand, involves rowing but no actual sailing) on Sunday. This is a special year for the University of Oulu in that it’s been exactly 50 years since the university’s first conferment ceremony in 1972, which means that its very first Jubilee Doctors were now celebrated in addition to the usual young doctors and honorary doctors. I had my own doctorate conferred on me in the previous ceremony in 2017, so I have quite a lot of living to do before I get to be a Jubilee Doctor, but in this day and age, with the wonders of modern healthcare, there’s a decent chance that I’ll make it.

Helsingin Sanomat ran a column about the Finnish conferment tradition a couple of weeks ago; the piece is in Finnish only, but the gist of it is that although the whole spectacle is a pretty incomprehensible ritual, we need rituals like that in our lives. Indeed, the conferment ceremony is just that, a ritual: you’re every bit as much a doctor regardless of whether you’ve attended the celebrations. The tradition traces its roots back to Medieval times, and I presume that originally the conferment ceremony would have been where you officially received your degree, but these days graduation and conferment are two distinct events and the latter doesn’t really serve any official function. Technically it’s only after conferment that you’re entitled to carry the symbols of the doctoral degree – the hat and the sword – but there are relatively few occasions where you get to wear the hat, extremely few where you get to wear the sword, and anyway, it’s not like you’re going to get arrested for wearing them “without permission”.

Ah yes, the hat and the sword. This particular bit of Finnish academic tradition tends to arouse a fair deal of curiosity in non-Finns, especially the sword part. Surprisingly many people I’ve met abroad have known about it, although there is a common misconception that “in Finland, when you get your PhD, you get a sword”, which I have disappointingly had to correct by telling them that 1) you have to wait until conferment, and 2) you have to pay for the hat and the sword yourself. The two together cost upwards of a thousand euros, and on top of that come the costs of attending the celebrations. You can choose to participate in only some of them – I skipped the sailing trip myself – or even none of them, but even just having your degree conferred in absentia costs a nontrivial amount of money.

Despite the required expenditure and the seemingly absurd nature of the conferment ceremony, it remains a popular event among new doctors and I certainly have no regrets about splurging on mine five years ago. This year I participated in a different role, singing with the choir in the ceremony proper and the church service. The ceremony was a somewhat strange experience in that we were providing background music and therefore trying to attract as little attention as possible to ourselves, the opposite of what we would normally aim for when performing to an audience. We were instructed beforehand that we should not at any point sing louder than mezzo-piano, which is not that easy to achieve with high notes – you can do those quietly, or you can do them well, but you can’t have it both ways.

In the cathedral we did not have to restrain ourselves and could use the acoustics to full effect. We sang two choral songs by Oulu-born composer Leevi Madetoja and joined the congregation in singing two hymns, including the much-loved Suvivirsi. A staple of Finnish end-of-school-year celebrations, I’ve sung it many times, but never quite the way we did it this time: each of the three verses was in a different language, the first one in Finnish, the second in Swedish and the third in Northern Sami. This brings the total number of languages I’ve sung in during my first year in the choir to eleven! The Orthodox cathedral choir also performed, sounding appropriately angelic, but to me the real star of the show was the organist, who had to keep playing music while the procession of academics walked into the church and then again while they walked out. Both operations took quite a while to complete, but the organist delivered, and we had the best seats in the house, with the massive organ pipes right behind us and the man himself in front of us. We had to suppress our desire to applaud and cheer him, but we did our best to express in other ways how much we loved his playing, and he was clearly delighted to have such an appreciative audience with him in the organ loft.

Today I have an appointment with the costume department of Oulu Theatre to have my measures taken for The Magic Flute; incidentally, this will be the first time I’m having clothes tailor-made for me, apart from my doctoral hat! The last rehearsal of the choir term is this week, the end-of-term party in mid-June, and then we’re off to summer hols as far as choir business is concerned. My actual summer holiday is not that far away either: five weeks of work – a time that somehow manages to feel both excruciatingly long and panic-inducingly short – and then three weeks off. Normally I’d take four, but I’m saving one week for a bit later to finally take a trip to the UK that I originally planned for the summer of 2020. So far everything looks good and I’ve made all the essential reservations, but they’re all refundable just in case. Fingers crossed I won’t be needing those refunds…