A place on a reserve list means that you fulfilled the requirements for the admission, but considering the quota of study places available, your position among the applicants was not good enough so that the Admission Services could offer you a study place at this point.
If any of the admitted students do not accept the offered study place, the Admission Services may offer admission to the applicants on the reserve list according to their ranking position. If several applicants have the same ranking position on the reserve list, they are offered a study place only if there are enough places available for all of them.
You are not offered admission if you have already accepted a study place in a degree programme at a Finnish institution of higher education starting in autumn 2024. This is due to so called One study place per term provision. According to this provision, a student may accept only one study place leading to a higher education degree in Finland in education that begins in the same academic term. This rule applies to all higher education.
If you are offered a study place, the Admission Services of the University of Helsinki will contact you through email. However, if you have not provided your email address in your application, the Admission Services will contact you with a letter through the postal services. When offering a study place, the Admission Services also updates the status of your application at studyinfo.fi from "On a reserve list" to "Accepted".
The reserve list is no longer used if any of the following conditions are fulfilled:
If you remain on the reserve list when the use of the list comes to an end, the Admission Services updates the status of your application at studyinfo.fi from "On a reserve list" to "Cancelled".
The Admission Services does not have resources to inform you on how many applicants on the reserve list have already been offered a study place, and, in this way estimate the likelihood of your acceptance to the particular study programme. In addition, there are no statistics available on how many applicants in the past years have rejected the offer or alternatively taken the offered study place on reserve lists.
For more information, please see statistics on student admissions.