My Choice.

Now a little bit about my personal choices. Once again I am applying to do a business related degree to become a bachelor of science. My first choice was Jönköping university. Jönköping is relatively big town for Sweden with around 85,000 people it is based just on the edge of Vättern lake, I think it’s even visible from the campus. The town has several nightclubs which is always a positive in my book. After all this is what university life is all about!
There is also a lot of foreign students because of their exchange program, over 200 partner universities. That certainly helps when you don’t speak Swedish, I assume they don’t as well. Because of the high number of foreign students the staff should have a lot of experience with dealing with such students. Meaning that you won’t end up one of the 15 foreign students in the whole university, with no information pack in English and such. I should also mention their website which for me is the only way to “feel” the university what is a about, the way they deal with things and so on. In my opinion it was quite informative and very helpful even thought they tend to mix bachelor and masters degree together, especially their FAQ pages. I have also emailed them a couple of times with my questions and the replies I received were quite quick. Maybe not as informative as I would have wanted but nonetheless they replied to me.
Because their application process is separate from the studera.nu pages I had to send a different pack of documents that I would send to the central application system.

I have also applied to study at Mälardalen University. They have 2 campuses in Vasteras and Eskilstuna. Both are located close to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, it is about an hour trip on the train. Vasteras is also located on the edge of another big lake in Sweden it might even be the third biggest in the whole country but I’m not sure about that. Also probably worth noting is that they have a small skyscraper 24 floors I think. The university itself was opened in 1977 and looks quite modern by the looks of it, you can have a look on flickr.com here.

I think the deciding factor in choosing this uni as my number one choice (but after Jönköping ) was the location as it is very close to Stockholm. And it is quite close to the rest of Europe. So travelling is that a little bit easier and more importantly for any students cheaper! From what I have read on their official website students at Mälardalen university get free train pass to travel between 2 campuses should they need to.
And my second choice (third overall) was Umea University; located up north, where it is colder and it’s around 11 hour trip by train just to the capital. It is quite close to Kiruna in Lapland, though.
It has the official status of university and is the biggest uni of the ones that have English bachelor degrees. The university also has its own hospital one of five in Sweden (don’t confuse with normal hospitals.) For those really thinking of applying there or just out of interest can view their real time webcam that shows the temperature outside. The university has its own business department – Umea School of Business, USBE. I think they named it USB at first but then realised that they would end up lost in Google’s search results because USB is also very popular cable for computer. Umea is a university town the big part of its population are students from the university and the official website says that there are approximately 110,000 people living there with the majority of its population under the age of 35. There is also one subway sandwich place! The city is also promoting itself as the capital of European culture 2014, mainly because of it jazz scene.
I would have chosen Umea as my first choice anytime because of it official university status and the high number of students, but its location far north is a little bit off putting as I want to travel. And also as a rule of thumb if any world known band come to play to Sweden they play in the capital, which is a little bit tricky to travel to. But I’ll try to tell a little bit more about travel later.

That hard second step or "Research"

So I started doing my research. So many things to find, out so much difference, so little time... After looking at several websites/forums I found that several universities do bachelor degrees in English, there aren’t that many because the majority of English instructed degrees are for Master students, almost every university in Sweden offers those. Since I’m applying to do a business oriented degree I found the following universities to be offering bachelor level education in English:

1. Jönköping University
2. Mälardalen University College
3. Dalarna University
4. University of Gävle
5. Umeå Universty

All of the above are högskola or in English university colleges, in other words not real universities as we like to know them (I’m thinking Oxford, Cambridge) More info on this can be found on Wikipedia here. Even though they don’t have the usual name of university they are allowed to conduct bachelor and master degrees and some even do PhD degrees.
There is also Umea University which is a proper university and has a lot of programmes in English it is also fifth oldest in the country, formed in 1965 and has around 29000 students. It is however, located in the north part of the country some 400 km south of the arctic circle.
The other exclusion is Jönköping University, it is a university but its International school of business (JIBS) – separate from the university itself has a lot of programmes in English. And as of 2007 you can’t apply to their courses through the central application system – studera.nu so if you are thinking of applying there you will need one more set of documents, more about that later on.