Hejsan alla
Exchange period is coming to an end and snowy Christmas is not here either! First when I heard I got to the exchange studies in Halmstad, I was happy and excited because everything is going to be little different than back in Finland. All the thoughts and stereotypes about Swedish people being so much different than us Finnish. But during exchange all of that was taken down piece by piece.
Halmstad Högskolan with the landmark of Trade Center in the background.
I was staying in Halmstad, southwest part of Sweden. Nice smallish place of about 70.000 people between Göteborg (140km) and Malmö (137km). The weather has been really rainy but for people living here it is the normal weather I hear. When I first arrived here I didn’t think it would snow at all, but I was wrong, there has been a couple of days of snow, just like in Finland!
Picture taken during a hike along Prins Bertils stig, which is a route from city center to Tylösand and back
City center has its shops and a canal splitting the city in half. City center has a big open square area in the middle and streets going to each direction, providing easy Access to all services needed. I would still recommend buying a bike on your trip to Halmstad as it is not necessary but it will let you experience so much more. There was good bus connections around the town, so you wouldn’t have any excuses for not going somewhere.
Also connections to other cities like Copenhagen, Malmö, Stockholm and Oslo most of which are accessible by train within couple of hours. And for people who have not seen Lapland local student organization arranged a trip to Kiruna with snowmobile and husky rides!
Down below iconic views from Stockholm, Copenhagen and main square in Halmstad.
What comes to studying in Sweden or Halmstad, it was delightfully similar to studies at TAMK. Most of studying had to be done on your free time having only a few lectures every week. With this in mind you have to have motivation and preferably a few friends to help you with the studies.
PCB milling during Electronical design and implementation-course
Teachers help whenever they can, but of course are booked most of the day. I had Electronic course which was project based as we designed and manufactured a PCB and assembled a working gadged of our choosing. On Working environment and leadership course we had many visiting lecturers from whom I learned how similar Finnish and Swedish working environments are. As a third course I had Computer Networks which was a certified CCNA course by Cisco academy. It was the basics of Computer networking, security, administration and maintenance. In whole my free time consisted mostly of studying and on weekends I tried to make trips around and connect with other exchange students. What was connecting factor with each course was that each of them had a theoretical and practical part in it, which I feel greatly improves learning experience and makes it more interesting.
Field visits to building site and EMC lab in Halmstad
As a closure: I had a good time in a lovely country with nice people. And as an advice to others going: get a bike and secondly remember that Swedish people are like us, we don’t go talking to people but usually like helping and talking if someone comes to talk to us!
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