Aeolienne
Well-Known Member
It was problems with the Swedish language over and above all else. I went out to Stockholm University with the expectation that I was going to have to attend lectures and write essays in Swedish, and that the university would provide intensive language coaching to bring me up to the required standard.
With the benefit of hindsight I should have realised that all was not as it should be when, following a diagnostic test, I was informed that my knowledge of Swedish was "good" and therefore I would have to wait until mid-way through the semester to start my language classes. (I had previously attended evening classes and a summer school, but I was far from fluent.) Even then I persisted in believing that it was meant to work out - I was naïve enough to believe that "approved Erasmus exchange" meant that some bureaucrat from Brussels/Strasbourg/Luxembourg/wherever had given it a seal of approval (whereas in fact all it meant was an informal agreement between universities). I thought I'd get extra coaching with my courses to compensate for the language barrier - only to find that my so-called Erasmus supervisor had gone off to Helsinki for the first half of the semester and no-one else had a clue what was expected of me!
When I eventually did get Swedish classes, they were only basic level. Eventually I found out that all the other Erasmus students in Stockholm attended tailor-made courses taught in English, hence what Swedish tuition that was on offer was intended merely to enhance the interest of their time there. My absentee Erasmus supervisor knew nothing of this - he just assumed that whatever Swedish tuition I received would be intended to make me fluent.
There were problems with the course content quite separate from the language of instruction. The first philosophy course I took - Proof Theory - presupposed a knowledge of Metalogic which I hadn't covered at my home university. It apparently had never occurred to any of the Stockholm dons to quiz me as to precisely what subjects I'd studied before. When I told the professor I couldn't follow the lectures, he said "Well, you can always ask questions in English"(!!) As for the maths, the department had - inexplicably - not been informed I was coming, although they didn't object to me registering for courses. However I admit I made things bad for myself by refusing to fork out 330 kronor for the course textbook and instead asking my family to order it for me from a bookshop in London (Amazon didn't exist back then) ... but it was out of stock and had to be ordered from the US, taking over a month to arrive.
Socially too the experience was a disappointment. Although allegedly Stockholm University had lots of clubs and societies to join, finding out about them was another matter entirely. There was no freshers' fair, nor any A-Z guidebook of societies or suchlike - but worst of all was the attitude of many students I spoke to: "Yes, Stockholm is a boring university in a boring city. You should have gone to Uppsala."
(When I decided to leave Stockholm after one semester, I was secretly hoping that people would take offence, as in say: "Oh, you don't like Stockholm, do you? Who asked you to come here anyway, you English scum? **** off back to England and take the acid rain with you!" It would have been so great to see some real emotions displayed. But of course this didn't happen.)
