Well it's been a month since I arrived here in Copenhagen and I'm absolutely loving it. There are two very important traits that every business major should have that I was lacking when I first started out at Shidler, being a people person and being able to interact with other people and being open-minded. Being an exchange student has helped me to do both. Now that a month has gone by I've met tons of new people, finished my first week of class, mastered getting to and from class using the metro, learned to buy groceries, and have just been having a blast.
Classes are very different from back at UH. Classes are usually once a week for 2.5 hours. This is both a good and bad thing. The bright side is I only have classes on Monday to Wednesday so I can travel on the long weekends. The downside is with really long classes it becomes a struggle to remain focused. This may be a personal problem for me but going from 50 minute or 1.25 hour class to 2.5 hour class is tough.
CBS is absolutely great in helping students get the most out of their exchange. This past weekend I went on a CBS organized trip to Berlin. For about $300 I got transportation, 2 nights in a hotel, 2 days of lunch, entrance to 2 night events, dinner in a restaurant one night, a guided tour of the city center, and a guided tour of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was an excellent deal to meet more exchange students and see another country. At the end of the month I'm going on trip to Oslo which was also arranged by CBS.
Aside from how much I love Copenhagen and CBS so far I do have a two things I'm not happy about. While this might sound like complaining I feel that it is important to know for prospective exchange students. First, housing here is an absolute nightmare. Being a naturally reserved person I definitely wanted to live in student housing where I would be surrounded by other students. This would have given me even more opportunities to meet new people. The whole point of the exchange is to meet and get to know new people and make international friends. While I wasn't able to get student housing I was fortunate enough to get private housing. My landlord is very nice and I can't complain. There were however, some students who were posting on CBS's facebook group for this semester's exchange students that they were still looking for housing. There was a good deal of people living in youth hostels until they found their own private housing. I'm not sure if MIX can pull strings to guarantee you student housing but it's probably worth asking if you're like me and need to be exposed to a lot of opportunities for interaction.
Secondly, you need to have a lot of patience in regards to not knowing when your finals will be. CBS is still organizing where and when finals will be held. It's not like at UH where you know is one week, monday to friday. At CBS your finals could be in November or I was told as late as December 23. Not only will I have to pay a good deal amount of money for two 1-way tickets, I had to agree to pay an extra month of rent just incase I needed to stay until Dec 23 and I still don't know when I'm going to come home or if I'm going to have time to travel before coming home.
Again, as much as I love CBS and Copenhagen I feel that prospective exchange students need to be aware that it, like everywhere else, isn't perfect.
Now here are some cultural things that I found very interesting:
Elections are not set for every 4 years like it is in the US. They can't put it off forever, but the party in office decides when elections are held. It can be a year after being in office or after 4 years. Therefore when the election date is announced there's heavy campaigning for only a few weeks. I thought that was interesting in comparison to the way we do it.
There are lots of Danish dads that take time off to raise their infant children while the moms go back to work. I was confused because I thought there were a lot of men walking around with strollers and carrying babies all over the place but I found out that it's common for the dads to watch the baby after only a short while of being with the mom for breast feeding.
Danish people are very timely. While I was raised to always be on time if not 10 minutes early, the Danes as a whole are always on time and it's a nice change from getting upset at my friends being late for everything.
That's all for now and I still can't believe I've already been here for a month, time is flying by!
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