Student Blogger Digest: Academics at DIS

Academics at DIS will probably look a bit different than they do at your home institution. Not only do we have our own approach to learning, we also have our own terms like Field Study and Study Tour that may be new to you.

Our students can best capture what it’s like to travel with their classmates on Study Tour or attend a Field Study. To find out what you can expect from a semester at DIS, check out a variety of student perspectives on the DIS academic model.

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Your Core Course and Study Tours  

Every DIS student enrolls in a Core Course, which serves as the backbone of their academics. During your semester with DIS, you travel with your Core Course on two faculty-led Study Tours, where you, alongside your teacher and classmates, venture outside of your home city to explore your academics from a European perspective.

Study Tours can take many shapes, but they all include opportunities to engage with hands-on learning activities, to see how your academic topic takes shape in real world situations, and to explore new places, cultures, and perspectives.

Core Course Week and Short Study Tour 

Core Course Week happens early in your DIS semester. After you’ve had a few weeks to adjust to a new schedule and settle into your new home, this entire week is dedicated entirely to your Core Course.

Together with your faculty and classmates, you will spend two days further exploring your home city and three days out on a Study Tour within Sweden, Denmark, or a neighboring country. Throughout the week, you’ll dive deeper into your Core Course’s academic material, visiting experts and academically relevant locations, all while growing closer with your faculty and classmates through fun, cultural experiences and meals shared together.

Even after the first day of the Study Tour, I began creating closer friendships with people from my class. Before the trip, I was a little hesitant to hop on a bus at 7 am and travel with people I met 3 weeks prior, but I ended up having so much fun. Obviously, it’s not unusual to make friends with people you have classes with, but traveling with them and experiencing new cultures together is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Taylor, University of Minnesota

Find more perspectives on Core Course Week: 

Long Study Tour

Later in the semester, all Core Courses travel out into Europe for five days on a week-long Study Tour. Your destination will depend on your Core Course, and it will have direct relevance to the topic of your studies.

Whether you end up traveling to Greenland to see the impacts of climate change from atop a glacial ice sheet, visiting southern Greece to study modern European refugee law, or probing the neuroscience of emotion through art and food in Paris, your long Study Tour will put your classroom learning into a brand new context that is specially designed to connect your academics to real world implementations.

Studying abroad is fantastic because you get to learn in and about an area of the world you never would have experienced otherwise. What’s even better about DIS specifically is that whatever you’re mainly learning about, they’ll just… take you to the place that has all the cool stuff about that topic! It’s a really tailored experience that allows all of us to interactively learn about the stuff we really love.”

AVA, Davidson College

Hear more from Student Bloggers:  

Beyond the Core Course: Electives, Field Studies, and career-focused learning 

Even though your Core Course is a hugely important part of your semester, that isn’t all that distinguishes the DIS academic model. You also have a broad range of elective courses that you can use to bolster your Core Course with a similar academic focus, or you can try something completely different with your time abroad.

Field Studies 

Every DIS course, both Core Courses and electives, has two Field Studies during your semester. These Field Studies occur on Wednesdays, when no recurring classes are scheduled, and are a special opportunity for your class to visit interesting academic sites throughout your home city. You might visit a museum, a local business, a nonprofit institution, or take a guided walk through a neighborhood. Field Studies provide a great chance to connect to your city in new ways and see your studies in action.

I loved how our Wednesdays were blocked for two Field Studies per course throughout the semester to gain various experiences in the city. The consistency of engaging in weekly outskirts and seeing more of Copenhagen was a HUGE reason why I loved my experience so much at DIS and ultimately fell in love with the city.”

Shantika, Johns Hopkins University

Read recaps of students’ Field Studies below: 

Hands-on learning

Even when you aren’t out on a Field Study or Study Tour, DIS faculty work to make everyday classes an engaging and exciting experience. This might mean bringing LEGOs into the classroom to model greenhouse emissions, or taking the classroom out into local neighborhoods to study local cultures through direct observation.  

Of course, you will still have classic lectures and readings as part of many of your classes, but at DIS, these are only one piece within the larger academic mosaic.  

In my Sustainable Food class, we utilized a childhood favorite, LEGOs, in order to construct a model of the greenhouse gas emissions produced from pork. The information feels astronomically easier to retain when I myself have been apart of the design process, as opposed to trying to recall a graph I saw once as a professor rapidly flipped through a lecture slideshow.”

Sadie, Wellesley College

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Curious to learn more?

>> Build your Semester at DIS Stockholm
>> Build your Semester at DIS Copenhagen