DIS Blog

Putting the “study” in “study abroad”

During our pre-departure study abroad orientation, my school cautioned us about to remember that studying abroad is in fact just that. While the “abroad” part definitely seems more exciting, they didn’t want us to forget that, at the end of the day, we’re still students! Finding a balance between exploring a new place and also staying on top of academics can be tricky (and since it’s finals season, this is especially pertinent right now!).

Fortunately, taking classes you enjoy helps a ton with this. For a lot of DIS students I know, the academic offerings were a big reason why they chose DIS – they get to study things related to their majors back home that not many programs offer. For me personally, I’ve definitely been grateful for the types of classes I’m able to take in Stockholm. Having options like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have let me study topics that fit in well with my Data Science major but that I might not have had the opportunity to take back home. I’ve also gotten to take classes unique to Sweden (most notably, the Swedish Language & Culture class), which has been really rewarding and fun as well.

Being a Data Science major also means I often get asked some variant of “So what do you actually do?” And with all the classes I’m taking here, I knew the topics seemed interesting, but I really had no idea what to expect. I figure it’s most helpful to give real, actual examples of what I’ve been working on this semester, so with that, I’ll take you along for a week in my life (class edition)!

Monday

I’m fortunate enough not to have to take any 8:30 classes, so I start my week off with Swedish Language & Culture at 10:05. This is a class any DIS student can take (and is highly encouraged to!). Also, since DIS is housed in the same building as KMH (the Royal College of Music – if the acronym doesn’t make sense to you now, it’s because KMH stands for Kungliga Musikhögskolan!), we also have a few KMH students from countries other than Sweden who participate in the class as well. I think this is awesome because it gives them the opportunity to learn more about their new home, and it gives us the chance to get to know students from other countries!

I’d taken other language classes before, so I knew a little bit of what to expect on that front, but I didn’t realize the culture part of the class would also be so prominent. This combination has been super helpful because, realistically, we’re not going to be fluent in Swedish by the end of our program, but we will remember all the cultural elements we’ve explored in class!

Language practice ranges from sorting sentences into order, asking and answering questions, and even Kahoot quizzes! (In true Swedish fashion, our professor typically doesn’t show us who won at the end – it’s not about the competition, just about learning!) Right now, we’re gearing up for our final oral exam, where we have a conversation with another classmate for five minutes, no notes, fully in Swedish. It sounded daunting at first, but we get to write up a script beforehand to help brainstorm our questions and answers, and we’ve been doing speaking exercises all semester, so this is just a continuation of that! I’m definitely a little nervous, but I’m also excited to get to see how much I’ve grown since arriving in Sweden!

Learning about Swedish culture also takes a lot of different forms. We do things like listen to Swedish music (which also helps us pick up the language better!), watch videos or read articles about life in Sweden, and explore the city for ourselves. We’ve learned about things like friluftsliv (outdoor living) and the unique Swedish way of interacting with nature (more on my experience of all this here!) We’ve also learned about Swedish history, including that of the Sami people, who are the indigenous people of Sweden. Our major cultural assignment was to explore a suburb of Stockholm and report back to the class on what we’d learned. My partner and I went to Liljeholmen, a very much up-and-coming area in Stockholm, and it was very interesting to talk to the people living there and hear about their experiences.

Swedish Language & Culture is a class I’d definitely recommend to any DIS student. The only regret I consistently hear from people is that they wish they’d taken the 6-credit class so that they could have learned even more!

After I’ve warmed up on my Swedish for the day, I head to my 11:40 class, Swedish Politics & Society. Since I’m a Political Science minor back at GW, I knew I wanted to take a political science class while abroad, and I’m so glad I did! My political science knowledge has been pretty limited to the US in the past, but with this class, I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge into Swedish politics and learned more about the rest of Europe too. Whenever political topics come up among my visiting host family or with other Swedes, I’m like, “hey, I know what they’re talking about!” Politics are so connected to society, so learning more about Swedish politics has been very valuable to me as I’ve spent time living in Stockholm.

Our professor always starts class off by asking us what we’ve observed just living in Sweden, which always leads to really interesting conversations and is a great way to connect Swedish politics to our actual experiences here. We have a variety of readings and videos that I always find myself taking notes on (not just to prepare for our Canvas quizzes, but because they really are super interesting!). We get lots of opportunities to discuss our thoughts and theories as well. We’ve also had more hands-on learning, like through our field studies, where we visited the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and got a tour of the Riksdag (Parliament). Since immigration is a large topic of political conversation in Sweden today, we also had a panel discussion with two people who had immigrated to Sweden to hear about their experiences and perspectives.

For our final project we have some freedom – we can write a traditional paper, or we can create a presentation, make a mind map, have a conversation with a Swede, or more! Like any final, it’s a little daunting, but I am excited for the experience to consolidate all my learning from the semester – there’s been a lot of it!

Tuesday

Masterminding my schedule to have no 8:30s or Friday classes was one of my best moves, but it does make for a long day on Tuesday! Luckily, that day doesn’t start until 1:15 (13:15, as one might write here!), so I have time in the morning to prepare myself. I start the day at DIS with Artificial Intelligence. This class has been a great addition to my core course, Machine Learning, and there’s a lot of student crossover between the three computer science classes I’m taking, so it’s nice to get to see some of the same faces throughout the day and week!

Like other DIS classes, there are multiple ways of learning in AI. We generally have lectures to start off the class that highlight different areas of Artificial Intelligence, like varying search algorithms. Even these are still hands-on, though – we often grab the giant post-its from the back of the room to draw out the algorithm being implemented ourselves! We also of course implement the different strategies we’re learning in actual code. The assignment we’ve been focused on throughout the semester is essentially a game with different levels. In each, a character (agent) has to move either itself or another object to a final destination. This lets us test out different algorithms and compare their pros and cons.

We also talk a lot about the ethics of artificial intelligence: recently, my group presented a critical review of an article about how the New York Times is suing OpenAI for ChatGPT’s use of their articles. Since AI is a rapidly developing field that definitely brings some cause for concern (how many times have you heard jokes about robots taking over the world?), I think weaving this into class is definitely beneficial.

Normally, DIS classes are an hour and twenty minutes, but my Tuesday classes are extra long since I only have them once a week. So, I get out of AI at 4:10 and head to App Development (starting at 4:25). Luckily, it’s all the same building, so not too much of a journey!

I’ve taken a lot of computer science classes before, but I’ve never coded my own apps, so this course has been a lot of fun! I think app development is a particularly fun field because you can very easily see the products of your work right away, which is super satisfying (and also helps with debugging!). We’ve made a few different apps in class. We started off with the basics of app design, where we brainstormed an app that we could create and determined what problems it would solve and who it would help. Our first big project was coding a Tic-Tac-Toe game! Later, we also made a to-do list app, where you can add and delete tasks and also mark them as complete. Most recently, we developed a sign-up flow, where a user creates a profile for an app by adding their name, age, profile picture, and location.

Our final project is developing an app from start to finish – we come up with an idea for what we want to create, explore different design possibilities, draw up our vision for the app online, then implement our prototype in code. It’s a big undertaking, but our class work has definitely prepared us for it, and it will be fun to apply our skills to something that we think is fun or interesting! My group is working to create a review app, like Letterboxd or Goodreads, but for music. Maybe we’re still feeling inspired from our field study at the Spotify headquarters!

When my Tuesday classes wrap up at 7:20, you’d think I’d have had enough of DIS, but I actually usually hang around for a couple more hours in one of the study rooms. Since it’s late, there’s always one open, and it’s a great time to squeeze in a little more work (or an interview or call to my friends and family, since it’s a much more normal time in the US!). Plus, I don’t have to worry too much about the following day, because Wednesdays provide an excellent break from traditional classes.

Wednesday

At DIS, there are no traditional classes on Wednesdays: instead, we have field studies! Field studies are a great opportunity for hands-on learning. You can read about a field study from each one of my classes here, but the main point is that we get to learn in a new way, by visiting companies, museums, or anywhere else in Stockholm! This is definitely unique from how classes go at school back in the US, and it’s been super helpful for me. I admit that sometimes I do wonder what people who studied the things I do actually do for work, so getting to hear about their experiences and see some of the options that are available has been really encouraging and fun. You can have anywhere from 0-2 field studies a day, but whether my days are jam-packed with adventures or if I just have some free time to get my life together, I know that Wednesdays will always be fun and unique!

Thursday

Again, my epic schedule does leave me at DIS for a bit on Thursdays, but those are always interesting days! I start off with my normal Monday schedule of Swedish Language & Culture and Swedish Politics & Society. Then I spend some time studying with friends and getting some lunch in before I have Machine Learning from 2:50-5:45.

Since it’s my core course, Machine Learning is a lot of fun, because it’s the class I have the most activities for! Getting to travel to Copenhagen and Berlin together has also really brought us together as a class. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, so I get to make a lot of connections between the two classes, but we also address a lot of different topics. We started off with the basics of machine learning, including the different types: supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, reinforcement learning, etc.! Like in AI class, we spend time learning about the topics from our professor and also applying them in code and discussing them in groups.

Amidst all our traveling and hands-on learning, we’ve also had a few really cool projects for class. One of our assignments was to code our own support vector machine (SVM), which is a supervised machine learning algorithm used for classification or regression. Basically, it finds the optimal line or hyperplane (like a road) between the groups you’re trying to classify, with one group on each side. (And for regression, it’s the same concept but opposite – you’re trying to find the road that all/most points fall on!) I’ll confess that we did grumble a little bit about having to implement this at the beginning (especially when there were python libraries that could just do it for us!), but having to do the work ourselves did really help me understand the concept (and the math behind it!) in a way that I never would have otherwise. Plus, I loved getting to see all my silly little plots!

The silly little plots in question – on the left is SVM with a linear kernel, and on the right with a polynomial one. You can see how they suit different types of datsets best – and see how the three lines make it look like a road?

Our final project gives us more freedom: we get to pick a dataset and analyze it using techniques in class, then write up and present our findings. My group chose a dataset on hotel reservations, and we’re trying to find a model that can predict whether someone will cancel their booking or not. Not only is this a great way to review the models we’ve looked at before, but it will also result in code and a blog post that we can put in our portfolios for our job search in the future – very multi-purpose! I’m looking forward to seeing how accurate we can get our model and to hearing what the other groups have found out about their data.

Ready for the Weekend!

And with that, my week of classes is done! That wasn’t so bad now, was it? I take 5 classes, which seems to me is pretty typical for most DIS students, but you can also take less or more depending on your needs and goals for the semester.

I’ve really loved getting to take such a variety of classes. I feel like I’ve learned a lot throughout the semester, both in class and through our hands-on learning. While I’ve definitely still had ample time to explore Stockholm and the rest of Europe, this semester definitely hasn’t been a joke class-wise! My DIS classes have been great preparation for my future career and an excellent supplement to what I’m learning back at GW. Finding the balance between “study” and “abroad” has been a bit of journey – I’ve definitely spent some late nights in the kitchen catching up on work – but as the semester comes to a close, I’m proud of how I’ve handled it. (And, for the first time ever, I’m actually ahead on my finals!)

My advice is kind of basic, but taking classes you actually care about and doing your best to optimize your class times according to your priorities is really helpful. At the end of the day, though, you can have a great study abroad experience no matter what your class schedule looks like! You’ll definitely have time to explore your new home and visit other countries while also still actually learning things. Of course, figuring out a routine and getting settled in is a big adjustment at first, but by the end of the semester, I think you too will be really proud of and grateful for your study abroad experience – not just the “abroad” part, but the “study” part too!

About the author

Elise (she/her) is a student at George Washington University majoring in Data Science and minoring in Computer Science and Political Science. At DIS Stockholm, she is taking courses in Machine Learning, App Development, and Artificial Intelligence, as well as Swedish Politics & Society and Swedish Language & Culture. Growing up in Seattle, Elise has an appreciation for the outdoors and she enjoys running and going on walks. She is looking forward to exploring the Stockholm nature and discovering new hobbies while abroad.