Hong Nhung Duongova - Köpenhamns universitet
Reseberättelse från Köpenhamn, Danmark
Copenhagen is a relatively busy and very lively city, where many events and activities are going on - namely students activities at UCPH, sometimes open lectures at CBS, cultural happenings in the city etc. It is a great place to visit galleries and museums or just to take a nice walk in the area of the city centre.
University of Copenhagen (UCPH)
UCPH is a large institution with a great reputation. Its campuses are spread all over the city, located further from each other and thus seem to be a bit isolated.
The student social and cultural life at LU is more cozy. Students from different faculties and departments are more likely to meet each other. In Lund I feel being more part of a student community not only of my faculty, but also of the whole university. In contrast, UCPH campuses were a bit out of reach from one another so other campuses were unfamiliar to me.
UCPH administration seems to be more robust and bureaucratic. It took me more time to sort out student ID cards there and sometimes it was unclear whom to contact in case of inquiry- most probably because there was no clear division of responsibility among the university staff, lack of communication among them or towards the students.
Faculty of Humanities building of both universities are newly reconstructed and have a fresh look. There are more study places at UCPH and more canteens and food to choose from.
Arrival
The introduction week at UCPH took place a couple of days. It was organized as a set of short presentations with Q&A in a lecture hall for cca 200 seats. Students got to meet representatives of the university management, administrative staff, academic advisors as well as students clubs and associations. Students got to know each other by doing some ice-breaking exercise. A short tour around campus was made too.
Courses
Teacher: Anne Schepelern
The course aim was to develop an idea for a story that would be later produced as a short movie or a series of short movies or another form of audio-visual content. In addition, we were supposed to use the best knowledge and practice of different media (social media, blogs, website etc.) to communicate the story with our target audience.
We usually had a 4-hour seminar once in two weeks during which our teacher gave a presentation about various theoretical approaches, showed us some examples and gave us the opportunity to discuss and work in small groups. We also had several guest lectures with people working professionally in the field of film-making and advertisement.
The outcome of the course was a piece of production made in a group (50 % of the grade) and an individual oral exam consisting of 15 minutes of our own presentation followed by another 15 minutes of answering questions from the 2 examiners (50 % of the grade).
Most of my classmates had a background in film and media studies, whereas I have it in cultural analysis. That made it a bit more challenging for me to learn some skills from scratch. However, our teacher provided beginners like me with some extra introduction classes, which were very useful and gave us more confidence.
We also got a lot of reading to do. Especially for the oral exam we got to choose our list of literature that would be around 1200 pages in total. However, the workload in general was manageable. Our teacher gave us a lot of flexibility and she expected us to work independently similarly to my experience at Lund University. The most intense period were the 2 weeks of production and editing when all groups had a set time for borrowing and using the university technical facilities and equipment.
The combination of extra introduction classes, a great teacher, a class of talented and constructive students, a decent group work and taking an effort in preparation for the oral exam gave me an A grade.
Accommodation
I had been living in Malmö before I applied to study as an exchange students at UCPH. Thanks to the proximity between my home address (close to Hyllie station) and location of the campus of the Faculty of Humanities (KUA) of UCPH I decided to stay in Malmö and commute to Copenhagen. Another important key factor for deciding not to move to Copenhagen was the fact that accommodation costs and other living costs are very high there. Moreover, I still had a few classes in Lund as well, so staying in Malmö seemed to be the best solution in terms of logistics.
Leasure/sparetime
I did not spend much of my spare time in Copenhagen since I had been living in Sweden and I did not want to invest extra money on transportation to CPH beyond my one-day tickets to lectures/seminars once in two weeks. I travelled a few times there to meet some friends, but since it was too time consuming and expensive to commute I stopped.
Costs
Copenhagen is consistently ranked among one of the TOP 10 or 20 most expensive cities in the world to live in, so I knew moving there would be costly. Due to high costs on transportation, I tried to save money by buying food, clothes and doing my leisure activities in Sweden.
Final remarks
I am very grateful for having the opportunity to go on exchange that challenged my personality, me as a student in a different academic setting, and to get to experience a beautiful city of Copenhagen and Denmark within my budget and time constraints. The exchange period there enriched me, but also reminded me to appreciate what I am getting at Lund University as well.
For more info about my exchange period, feel free to contact me.
Text: Hong Nhung, Duongova,