Nevertheless, three adventurous anthropology students from UB braved the Arctic terrain to study such topics as Scandinavian art and reindeer-herding as pioneers in a new exchange program with Finland's University of Oulu.

Under the advisement of Ezra Zubrow, professor of anthropology, Patrick T. Daly, Phillip A. Trella and Michael D. Frachetti-all recent UB grads-undertook an in-depth, on-site survey of Nordic culture, history and society. As part of their work in Finland, the then-undergraduates also set up a joint geographic information system (GIS) research center involving UB and the University of Oulu.

Zubrow, who has lived in Finland, created the exchange program in collaboration with longtime friend Milton Nunez, professor of archaeology at the University of Oulu. The program is open to qualified UB students for a semester or a full year. This semester, a Finnish student is studying at UB and two UB students are in Finland as part of the program.

The first participants spent the Fall 1995 semester at the University of Oulu in Scandinavian studies courses such as "Historical and Linguistic Survey of Scandinavia" and "Indigenous Cultures of the Polar Region." The courses, all transferable for UB credit, included excursions or field trips to Finnish Lapland, the Russian-Finnish border, Helsinki, Stockholm, the Arctic wilderness and Rovaniemi in the Arctic Circle.

The three said that one of the best features of the program was the wide range of course offerings that allowed them to construct a plan of study around individual interests.

They agreed that the field excursions were the most exciting parts, especially those to Lapland, the northernmost part of Finland, where they studied the culture of the Saami people. The Saami, also known as Lapps, have their own language and political system and are related in some ways to the Eskimo, or the Inuit of the North American Arctic. Each student spent a night with a Saami family as part of the excursion.

They also visited a reindeer farm, a paper mill, a logging site and a peat quarry to study the region's economy.

One excursion required the students to climb a mountain to study snowfall patterns at high elevations and then to ski back down.

For Daly, an "awesome experience" was living for a week in a cabin with no power in the middle of the Arctic winter. The students had to cut through several feet of ice on a lake to obtain drinking water. The typical temperature-35 degrees below zero-was "beyond anything that even people in Buffalo could imagine," he said. However, Trella added, "There is virtually no wind there, so the cold isn't nearly as noticeable."

Other than weather, Buffalo and Oulu have little in common, according to the UB alums.

Frachetti said that in northern Finland, the pace of life is slower. "Although the people are well-educated, their heritage drives them to embrace their culture by returning to traditional occupations such as craftsmen, reindeer herders, woodcarvers and hide tanners. He also noted another big difference: "No reindeer walking the streets of New York" cities.

Frachetti, currently pursuing his doctorate in prehistoric archaeology at London's Cambridge University, said that if it were not for his trip to Finland, he would never have taken the step from being a student to being a researcher. "I learned how to structure large-scale projects and how to produce results from that structure. I attribute my success at Cambridge to what I learned in Finland," he said.