At the beginning of November 2009 somewhere on Twitter (I didn’t even remember exactly where) I found one amazing video which has changed something in me. I’ve been so much inspired by this video, those people, this atmosphere, this idea, I cannot even describe it. Here it is:

Back in November if someone would say to me that I’ll meet some of those people in real life and I’ll actually visit this amazing place in just few months I would never believe in this.

I’ve started to follow Hyper Island’s blog, twitter and some of the students twitter accounts. I’ve watched their lives and falling in love in this whole Hyper Island thing more and more.

In December Hyper Island blog made an announcment about their Recruitment Tour. Basically, it’s just series of events when potentional Hyper Island students are solving some creative tasks, talk about themselfs, etc. You know, like really big job interview. So, they’ve had Recruitment Days in the following cities around the globe: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, Oslo, Sao Paulo and Stockholm. And since recently one really good friend of mine moved to Stockholm I decided – why not to try? I wrote a little bit about myself in application letter, attached my resume and portfolio, clicked “Submit” button and completely forgot about it for the next few weeks. At that time my portfolio stincked a lot, so I didn’t really believed that I might be chosen among the others to the next stage of the recruitment proccess.

On some usual boring evening in January 2010 I was sitting at lecture in my university and suddenly my phone started to ring. I took a look at number: “+46!? Who the hell is this?” – I thought. Anyway, I picked up the phone and said “Hello”. It was some guy from Hyper Island staff calling and he said that I’ve been chosen for the next stage to the actual Recruitment Day and now I can go to Stockholm. First thing that I thought after this wasnt “OMG!” or something like this, I thought “Wow, that’s cool, but I don’t have enough money to make it”. I said to this guy that I’ll think about it and that’s all.

Later I was thinking about this chance a lot, took a look at my bank account and said: “Screw it! Whatever. I’m going”. Two weeks to get multi-visa and I’m ready to go. Later, somehow I actually decided to go beyond Stockholm and (just for fun) visit Oslo, Amsterdam and Paris. Which I did and actually it was one of the greatest experiences in my whole life yet.

The Recruitment Day was planned for March 20th but suddenly they’ve postponed it to March 27th. I’ve already bough an unrefundable ticket to Stockholm, so I just extended my Stockholm vacation for few more days. From March 2nd to 18th I was on internship at Grey Moscow and on the next day I came to Stockholm directly from Moscow.

On March 20th they’ve had an Open House event. There were lots of people and actually lots of students, all of them were really talkative and open. I didn’t even visit Recruitment Day yet, but I was already completely in love with Hyper Island.

Next week on March 27th I came to Recruitment Day. The funny thing is that it was exactly on my birthday :) I was a bit disappointed because of number of people – there were actually 5 people including me (one guy from Greece, one from Finland and two local guys from Sweden). We all had a personal interview (my first real interview in English, btw), we solved some English tests, we solved one personal creative task and one group creative task. And actually we spent a really great time :)

Four days later I’ve received a letter from Hyper Island informed me of my acceptance to the The Digital Media Program. I actually made it through the whole thing and I could have started studying at Hyper from August 2010. But… it’s really fucking expensive for me and I physically don’t have that kind of money :( I would do anything to study at Hyper Island and this is an amazing to chance but… not now. Maybe later, who knows (I don’t wanna arouse pity, I’m just saying). And maybe it’s just isn’t my way – I’m gonna do it differently which is might be quite cool (or maybe not) – we’ll see :)