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STUDYING IN SWEDEN

Seven things you need to know before coming to Sweden to study

You’ve been accepted to university in Sweden, accepted your spot, and applied for your residence permit. Now it's time to prepare for your move. Maybe you’re wondering what life in Sweden will be like? Here are some tips based on my first year living in Lund, where I'm currently studying.

Seven things you need to know before coming to Sweden to study
Newly arrived students enjoying the Swedish autumn at Uppsala University. Photo: Liam Karlsson/Imagebank Sweden

Buying new is so passé

Need a winter jacket? Bedroom furniture? Maybe a new baking sheet for whipping up something from Sweden’s never-ending list of seasonal pastries? Whatever you do, don’t buy it first-hand. Sweden is teeming with second-hand stores, selling everything from wine glasses and patio furniture to boardgames. On my walk into Lund’s city centre, I pass a second-hand shop which frequently has bras hanging in the window – undergarments is where I draw the line, but to each their own.

Some shops are well-curated; others appear to be a dumping ground for anything and everything cleared out of junk drawers and closets after a long cleaning hiatus. But the search for the perfect formal dress for a sittning (one of Lund’s popular formal dinners) or a ball is half the fun – so grab a friend, and get browsing!

Want a drink at home on a Sunday? Plan ahead

Sweden’s Systembolaget shops have the monopoly on alcohol sales in the country – you won’t find anything over 3.5 percent anywhere else. And these shops aren’t open 24 hours. They close early on Saturdays, and don’t open at all on Sunday. If you fancy something other than a warm beer from your local supermarket on a Saturday night, plan ahead and pay a visit to your local Systembolaget. If you’re in a student-filled area, you’ll find plenty of your peers doing the same, walking out with cases of beer, boxes of wine, and whatever liquor they can afford. Be warned: drinking in Sweden is not cheap! Downing a pint at home instead of at a bar will save you a few kronor.

Failing a class…isn’t as bad as it sounds

So you’ve failed a class. Now what? Well, not much. You can take the exam again and again until you pass, so long as the material on which the test is based is not changed. If that happens, you may have some new topics to learn. In my media and communication studies MSc programme at Lund University, professors provide three deadlines for submitting the essays that we must write in place of exams. If I don’t submit my paper by the first deadline, I know I’ll have two more penalty-free opportunities to get it done. And if I receive a failing grade, that grade will not go on my academic record – instead, my record will not be updated until I submit a passing paper. While I’ve yet to take advantage of this system, knowing that missing a submission or failing a class is not a disaster is a welcome change from the strict, deadline-driven American environment in which I completed my bachelor’s degree.

Getting a bank account is a long process

Don’t bring cash with you. You’ll never spend it. I’ve still got some cash sitting in a drawer, because I keep forgetting which ATM near me will let me deposit cash into my account – my bank branch is cashless, and won’t help me there. Make sure to let your bank at home know you’ll be using your card in Sweden.

I moved to Sweden at the end of September. I didn’t open my bank account until mid-January. Opening an account entails a lengthy journey through Swedish bureaucracy, beginning with an application for a personal number, or personnummer. You can apply for a personal number at your local Skatteverket, or tax agency, office, provided that you can document you will be in Sweden for more than one year. I’m lucky enough to attend one of the universities piloting a two-year student resident permit, so proving the length of my stay was easy. While I got my personal number within 10 days, the process can take up to 18 weeks.

So you’ve got a personal number. The next step is to get an ID card, also from Skatteverket. There are three offices that issue ID cards: in Malmö, Gothenburg, and Stockholm. And appointments book up fast. I waited six weeks for mine. I got my ID card quickly, within two weeks – a friend waited months for hers to be issued.

Finally, with what I thought was sufficient documentation in hand, I walked into a Nordea bank to open my account. I was sent home account-less that day though, with the bank requesting statements from my Pakistani accounts. Armed with even more paperwork a few days later, I finally completed my application for a bank account. About a week later, my account was open. And finally, I had BankID – the magical Swedish eID that opens all sorts of doors, including, finally, digital access to my Covid-19 vaccination records. Swedish bureaucracy is a multi-layered beast, each layer tightly entwined with the others, and it took me months to unlock all the layers, starting with my personal number and ending with my digital ID.

Stock up on candles

The winters are dark. And long. And depending on where in Sweden you are, either delightfully snowy, or constantly slushy. In Skåne, there’s slush. So when you get home and peel off your jacket and scarf and hats, and it’s 3 pm and dark and dreary, you light a candle. Or two, or three. Preferably scented. Candles have gotten me through dark Scandinavian winters before when I lived in Copenhagen, and they continue to do the trick. I brought a favourite coffee-scented offering from a small Pakistani company with me, that I’m still rationing. If you don’t have a favourite to bring with you, you can browse through the selections at IKEA and Lagerhaus. Some friends of mine opt for fairy lights to brighten up their apartments, but I prefer the warm glow of a candle’s flame. Perhaps I just like fire.

Don’t worry if your Swedish is stuck at a basic “hej”

Almost everyone can communicate in basic English. That said, learning the local language is never a bad thing. After all, if your hope is to stay on in Sweden, you might soon need to prove a basic level of Swedish proficiency before getting permanent residence.

But ditch the Duolingo – or at least, don’t rely on it exclusively. One of the benefits unlocked by a personal number is the opportunity to enroll in SFI, or Swedish for Immigrant, language classes, offered by your municipality free of charge. You can choose to study in person or online, morning or evening. Do it! It’s a great way of understanding the language – wait until you hear about all the different ways in which adjectives can end – and as a bonus, you can also expand your social circle with the other students in your class.

Holidays and traditions are a serious business

If you’re currently waiting for your student visa, you may have already experienced how tough it is to get hold of office workers in July. Annual leave is taken seriously here, with workers taking several weeks off during the summers. No checking email, no answering work calls – pure vacation mode.

This commitment to time off for enjoyment also applies to holidays throughout the year. On Valborg, on April 30, I saw my largest Swedish crowds: about 50,000 people crammed into Lund’s city park, well on their way to total inebriation by 11am. The celebration, to welcome the coming spring, brings Swedes out of their homes after the winter, with massive bonfires burning bright in the evenings. Midsommar, the summer solstice, is also celebrated hard, with families and groups of friends bringing picnics into parks around maypoles, where they sing about small frogs and dance around, gripping onto their partners’ earlobes.

Member comments

  1. I agree that the American academic environment is not ideal. But as a lecturer, it’s difficult to accommodate the ‘omtenta’ system. If you don’t turn in an assignment or take the exam when we have planned for it, and then want to turn it in later – well, then I have to write a brand new exam and I don’t get paid for doing that. It’s also very disruptive when students get in contact a year later and want to turn in assignments. I think that everyone should have second (and third) chances. But your overworked and underpaid lecturers are having to deal with your late assignments during their weekends and evenings, so please try to be respectful of this.

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MY SWEDISH CAREER

Meet the choir leader on a mission to bring Swedes and immigrants together

Serbian artist, former X Factor judge, and Eurovision backup singer Kristina Kovač would maybe never have landed her Swedish career had it not been for networking. Now she's trying to bring other people together through the help of two new choirs.

Meet the choir leader on a mission to bring Swedes and immigrants together

Kristina Kovač remembers the exact moment she decided to move her family to Stockholm.

“It was in Götgatan, the small part of Götgatan where it goes uphill towards Slussen, and it was a nice day for a change. Blue skies, wonderful Swedish blue skies, and young people, beautiful people, happy people going around with their kids and everything,” she tells The Local.

“I just looked at them and I remembered what normal life is supposed to look like, because that’s one thing that we forgot in Serbia unfortunately.”

After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Kristina said there was a noticeable change in the atmosphere of the country, where years of struggles had made their mark on society and the people.

“For me it’s important what’s around me, what kind of a setting, are other people happy, are we all together as a nation going to a good place or not. That’s why I needed to go.”

Kristina’s career as a writer and composer had already brought her to many different countries.

She was immersed in the world of music from an early age. Her father, Kornelije Kovač, was a musician, songwriter, composer and producer. Having attended music school, where she learned how to play the piano, she wrote her first song at the age of 13.

At the age of 16, both Kristina and her sister Alexandra sang the backing vocals for the singer who represented Serbia in the Eurovision contest, which took place in Rome in 1991.

In 1995, Kristina and her sister released their first music album, titled K2, with their second album, Malo Soula, being released the following year in 1996. Kristina then dropped her solo album in 2007, and she was a judge and mentor on X Factor Adria in 2013.

Kristina Kovač as a judge on X Factor Adria, the Balkan version of the British music competition franchise. Photo: Private

Her visit to Stockholm was love at first sight, but because Serbia is not a member of the EU, moving to Sweden was far from a matter of packing her bags and getting on the first flight.

Because her grandfather was from Hungary, however, she was able to apply for a Hungarian passport with only one big condition attached to it: she had to learn to speak Hungarian.

“For two years I was on and off with my professor studying. I went to the interview in the embassy, then waited for nine months to hear whether it was OK or not. I had to learn all the time because you must not forget it until you get your passport, so it was really stressful. For me it was very important because it was my only ticket to Sweden, and I knew I wanted to move my family here.”

Kristina Kovač knew as soon as she visited Stockholm that she wanted to move there with her family. Photo: Private

Once she had cleared the hurdles and moved to Stockholm, new challenges appeared.

For three months, Kristina found herself applying to many different job ads and going around with her CV to businesses all across the city, and still struggled to find a job. But she never gave up hope.

“When you’re happy with something big that you’ve done [moving to Stockholm], I was like ‘OK, I’m here now and I’m going to make this work. I’m not going back’,” she says.

It was a chance encounter that eventually helped her land a career in Sweden.

One day, she saw an article about an Australian girl, Grace, who won a competition run by the Abba Museum in Stockholm to become an international member of the Abba Choir and perform at the 40th anniversary of Abba winning Eurovision, and she reached out to her.

After making that connection and telling her that she was looking for a job in Stockholm, Kristina was advised to visit a co-working space where she could work from. That’s where she met a Brit, Tony, a musician, songwriter and entrepreneur, and it would turn out to be a crucial meeting.

When Kristina, frustrated with her job hunt, posted on Facebook that she was considering looking for cleaning jobs since she was not offered a position in any other sector, she received a message from Tony.

They scheduled to meet for a coffee and after three hours of meeting and chatting about what job would suit her best, he called and offered her a job for an AI startup, doing data labelling and office management.

“This is one of those miraculous things where one small thing leads to another small thing which changes your life,” says Kristina. “So, at [age] 45, I got this wonderful chance because of this wonderful man who just did this for me because he saw the potential in me and he wanted to help.”

However, Kristina’s passion for music was still there and after four years she was tired of the office job, so she decided to set up her own music business – K’s Music Hub – and work for herself.

Kristina has been immersed in the music world from a young age. Photo: Private

She’s now getting ready to launch K’s Music Hub’s first project: establishing two choirs.

The first choir is The Melting Pot Collective Choir, inspired by her experience in creating close connections in a new country. They will sing contemporary pop and rock music, from classics to contemporary hits.

“The concept is to have both immigrants and Swedes. But the whole point is to bring people together,” she says, noting how she’s found some of the Swedish stereotypes not to be true.

“I’ve been hearing complaints from people who moved here like ‘oh, they’re cold, they don’t want to be friends and they’re like this’ and people always complain. I was always defending the Swedes in the sense of, ‘wait a minute, they’re not cold, they’re just shy’,” she says.

She encourages other newcomers not to be afraid of taking the first step to befriend Swedes.

“It’s their culture. They were brought up not to initiate, not to push themselves upon people. So, the initiative has to come from us, the newcomers, but they always respond very positively to any initiative.”

The second choir is called Brotherhood and Childhood – a play on words as the words are very similar in Serbian – and is aimed at bringing together people from the former Yugoslavia.

“I really want people to love each other for being people, for being good, for being kind, for loving music, for being talented, for doing something together, creative,” she says.

Like all other aspects of her company, Kristina will be overseeing both choirs.

“I will be the choir leader and the vocal arranger.” Along with that she will be “doing the rehearsals, teaching people, helping members articulate their voices and working on vocal technique during the choir rehearsals”.

There will be a group audition for The Melting Pot Choir on March 12th and for the Brotherhood and Childhood Choir on March 13. The spring semester will consist of 12 rehearsals with the final performance taking place in June.

Nevertheless, Kristina explains that the criteria are not difficult to meet.

“I had many questions from people who wanted to apply. How good do I need to be? I say, you don’t have to be overly good. You don’t have to be a great singer. You just have to be able to carry a tune in tune. It is quite enough to be able to carry a tune and have the basic choir singing skill – sticking to your line while other people stick to theirs. That should be quite enough for the choir to sound great in no time.”

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