This is the (possibly mistaken) Google translation for “A short trip to Helsinki” into Finnish! Indeed, being involved into an evaluation panel for the Finnish Academy of Sciences, I will be away to Helsinki, Finland, for the two next days. Although this activity is time-consuming, I always find this kind of experience rewarding as the evaluation of grant applications brings forward current (and future) directions of research in our field. In the current case, although I cannot unveil too much, the panel is broader than in the NSF Statistics and Probability grant panel I was involved with, say, but this is also interesting since colleagues from other fields will necessarily have different perspectives on which directions are more relevant. Contrary to a “popular” belief, I have never had the feeling that some panel members in those situations were clearly biased towards a subfield or a group of researchers, but on the opposite that discussions were quite open and objective. (Of course this may reflect my naïvety rather than truth!)