Stockholm School of Economics in Riga Students' Magazine

Simona, Modestas, Anna, Viktorija, Kadi and Madli

Instead of mandatory internship, six of us (Modestas, Simona, Viktorija, Anna, Madli and Kadi) were brave enough and decided to go to Denmark and spend a month in one of the windiest and the most expensive country in Europe. Nevertheless, we had loads of fun and here is a small summary of it.

The course we chose was Brand Management. Basically a lot about marketing and branding all topped off with loads of examples. We definitely have much higher brand awareness after that course. The lecturer himself was of Swiss origin, but living and teaching in Australia. Besides an interesting accent, he was a great teacher.

Anyway, the course was the summer university’s biggest consisting of 50 people. Most of them were Danish, but also us from the Baltics, Australians, Norwegians and Italians. During these 3 weeks, we had a chance to get to know most of them. However, in the dorms we had even wider variety of nationalities, all of them were very friendly and cool. It is an awesome experience to get to know other cultures.

We lived in the dorms, which were approximately four kilometres away from the school and the city centre. But only 15 minutes from the beach! As we rented bicycles during the first week, we could cycle around Aarhus all the time. Denmark is just perfect place for cycling: they have created separate roads for bicycles and all the car-drivers respect you. In other words, you do not have to be afraid for your life when cycling as in the Baltics.

The school had arranged us many events that we could attend starting from grilling parties and ending up with eating traditional Danish food – Smørrebrød, which were basically sandwiches. At first it seemed rather surprising that they eat sandwiches all the time, so I guess all of us were pretty fed up with them after the Summer Uni.

However, we arranged some “get-togethers” on our own in the dorms and of course we visited the most popular Aarhus bars and student clubs. We tried to take the maximum out of our trip to Denmark, so we found ourselves partying in the city centre and walking back home 5 am quite too often.

But all in all, we definitely had loads of fun and despite the rainy weather we were still able to enjoy our summer. We took an interesting course, lived in Denmark for almost a month, rode bicycles every day and emptied our pockets because of the high BigMac index there ;)

Madli Allikmae & Kadi Pung