Exchange at KTH Stockholm

During the autumn semester of 2022, I studied abroad at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. I had wanted to go on an exchange for a long time already, and even though it was quite different from my expectations, it did turn out to be an amazing experience.

Motivation

Originally, I had planned to study in Stockholm during the fourth year of my bachelor’s — after my board year at AEGEE-Leiden. However, the COVID-19 pandemic caused it to be cancelled. Thus, I tried again during my master’s, this time with more success.

Despite never having been to Sweden before, I was rather intrigued by the culture, the nature, and its high placement on various indicators such as the World Happiness Report and Human Development Index. I was therefore excited to explore the country, and did my best to learn some Swedish before the trip.

Education

Although I technically only needed 18 more credits for my degree, I decided to attend 30 credits worth of courses, partly because there were many interesting courses and partly because this way I would experience Swedish education just a bit more. The courses themselves were more or less computer science related, but not necessarily about artificial intelligence. I liked discovering these new fields:

• Music Informatics taught me how music can be represented digitally and how, among other things, music recommender systems such as Spotify’s and music identifiers such as Shazam work.
• Management of Projects, naturally, dealt with project management in all shapes and sizes.
• Multimodal Interaction and Interfaces was all about novel modes of interaction with computers, and included some fun demos with AR/VR equipment.
• Interaction Programming and the Dynamic Web gave an introduction to web development with React and Vue, and provided the impetus I needed for making this website.

Living in Sweden

Aside from really enjoying the education, I found myself at home in the city as well. Stockholm is very friendly, with amazing public transport, rich architecture, lots of museums, very accessible nature, and some things that you will only find in cities that truly care about their citizens, such as a plethora of bicycle pumps and many outdoor gyms placed along running trails. Anything you would need or want was close at hand.

I initially intended to blend in well with the local students. However, after not making it through the selection of the ‘DJ community’ of the student organisation (which seemed like a great place for me), I did not find another good opportunity to do so. Instead, I often went to discover Stockholm and its surroundings on my own. Still, during my exchange many people came to visit me, so there was never a dull moment that made me wish to have found a solid group of people to be with. I definitely see myself going back there in some time.

About the image:
The header image is a picture I took of the courtyard of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. I walked through this courtyard every time I had a lecture to follow.