As you know, I studied the Master in Tourism Destination Development at Dalarna University and recently graduated. In this blogpost I want to give you my honest opinion about studying in Sweden. I would like to address various points and make the comparison to my study experience in Germany.
First, I would like to give the all-clear, I have enjoyed my time in Sweden, and I am happy and proud that I have decided to take this step of studying in Sweden.
Studying at the university
First of all, I really liked the way my different classes were taught. In my case, in most of my classes we had to write several assignments instead of written exams at the end of the semester. In my opinion, I got much more out of the teaching and understood it better. Why do I emphasize this so much? Well, in Germany we also did similar methods with projects, but I always had a written exam at the end of the semester and that was always very stressful and less useful in my eyes. That doesn’t mean that it was never stressful in Sweden, on the contrary, keeping to the deadlines wasn’t always easy. However, I find this system much more worthwhile to really learn something. This way, I have dealt much more intensively with the topics in my courses and kept the knowledge in my head, rather than just learning it by heart but really dealing with it at all.
In addition to that, I also liked most of my professors that I got to know during this year. It was super exciting especially because they all come from other countries and have emigrated to Sweden and therefore, they have various perspectives from their own experience and cultural backgrounds. I found this particularly interesting, as it led to exciting discussions in class. Of course, these also arose because the class was very international. We were students from all over the world and that made the learning interesting.
Life in Sweden
Life in Sweden was similar to what I was expecting it to be after I have done some research about the country. Since I come from Germany, I fortunately had no big problems adapting to the culture and people, since we are quite similar. Things that were very different were mainly the price differences to Germany, as Sweden was more expensive with most products compared to Germany. I had to adjust quite a bit, especially when it came to buying groceries. Mostly fresh vegetables and meat had higher prices than what I was used to. But even that was just a matter of getting used to it.
Sweden taught me the fika culture, which I would like to bring back with me and continue doing that in Germany. There is nothing better than taking the stress and hurry out of the day and just sitting with friends in the sun with coffee and pastries. I love that the Swedes are so obsessed with this small but very meaningful break in the day, or rather FROM the day.
But besides all these things, the closeness to nature and the fresh air was one of the highlights of studying in Sweden and especially in Borlänge. The nature can be found already 15 minutes away from Locus (the student housing), where you could go hiking on the Paradisbacken or skiing in winter. All around the city there were beautiful paths and lakes where you could relax from the stress of studying and something like that is very important for me personally.
I hope I was able to give you an insight into how it feels like to study in Sweden. I can definitely recommend studying in Sweden. It enriched me a lot and I would do it again and again. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below the blogpost.
All photos by Jenny
Dalarna university student blog 