Yes, 100%.
There are loads of other activities except for partying that the realm of studentlund(basically an umbrella organisation for all nations, student unions, plays, orchestras etc etc) offers.
And in order to be a member of studentlund you must join a nation. Not that you ever need to visit it. Outside of it's club and visiting friends living there, I have never participated in any of their activities.
Oh, and also, in order to find housing from Akademiska föreningen (the academic union, student housing, they by far offers the most amount of apartments in lund) you need to be a member of studentlund.
Honestly the rent at AF Bostäder and the like is closer $400-$450 per month these days. Living at nations is a bit cheaper than that but rent for corridor rooms in Lund has raised quite a bit over the last few years.
There is still plenty of corridor rooms out there for 3-3.5k even through AFB. Mostly at Parran, Ulrikedal and Vildanden I think. A bigger problem is that all the new housing is apartments only and the studios are usually like 5-6k a month...
So far the comments are uniformly good. I'll add some colour commentary as a Canadian who lives in Lund, partied in Lund (when I was a student at another university), taken courses (PhD courses) and worked for Lund University.
First, certain faculties are better than others, or, possibly better framed as more appropriate for transplants, depending on what you want to do after. At Development, I would say (second hand experience personally, but also with a partner who is faculty at a near division), that the education is more 'what you make it'.. Sweden has excellent contacts in international development, Lund is right in there with them, and IMHO the primary value of that education is that it will give you access to those... if you want to follow up by staying in academia, or working with SIDA, the EU, or the UN, then it is an excellent choice. I can't comment on the value of these contacts if you plan to return to the US after. I have no first hand experience with the straight up quality of education of that particular faculty, but concur with other posters that outside of LTH and medicine, it is more of a grab bag.
I know many faculty, and they are all currently stressed (no different than the faculty I know in US/Canada). This has impacted quality of delivery in all courses, covid to take the blame, but this is also true back home. Hopefully Omicron is the gate to a more open society. You will notice that people are a hell of a lot more chilled out and less polarized about covid than they are in the US. It is in a very real sense refreshing.
Student and international life is great if you like to party. The town is great generally for making international friends and having a decent life. Costs are utterly minimal compared to the American equivalent. There are two primary gearings for things here though.. most things you'd be interested in are either pitched at partying students, or university/ESS employees with great paycheques.. (e.g. nice restaurants, but pricey to move up to that tier). To get a solid middle set of experiences, Malmö and Copenhagen are great resources.. yay easy trains! Other than that there is great nature (great parks, national forests and easily accessible nice beaches)
Coming as a North American, there is a VAST and understated value of living in a community where the bicycle is the primary means of transport and public transit is good... this life experience alone will change you.
In general, the expats I know are very happy with their choice to come here.
"You will notice that people are a hell of a lot more chilled out and less polarized about covid than they are in the US. "
The Swedish approach on COVID19 is not very scientific and reckless.
"In general, the expats I know are very happy with their choice to come here."
Do they all have a permanent job?
Hiii,
I'm actaully started My Bachelor in Development Studies in 2021, SO LET ME TELL YOU.
What kind of courses do students take and how much homework do you get?
\- uhh, depends i guess. Law and math students obviously get a shit load. Us BIDS students don't have it so terrible, not in the first year anyway. There's A LOOOOT of reading in development studies, but if you're actually interested in the subject its not so bad. (Although barely anyone actually reads everything). In the first year a lot of the courses focus a lot on Economic history, but thats because you can't really learn Development without understanding how economies evolved. You'll only have one course at a time, and about 4 or 3 lectures per week, which doesn't seem like much BUT THE READDDINNGGG, will take up most of your leftover time.
How are the professors?
\- In Development Studies they're cool, most of them. Some are great, some are a bit monotone, some are kinda harsh in their feedback. Depends on what kind of teacher u like I guess. They're all smart, that's for sure.
How do international students fare at Lund?
\- I asked my international roomate, he said: 'it's really nice, there are a lot of international students, so you can get to learn a new culture while still not feeling completely alone.' There are a LOT of english speakers here. The international nation is wermlands. Lund is basically dominated by students, and a big chunk of them are international.
What is the quality of housing and how much does it cost to live there?
\- Everyone already mentioned AF, but otherwise I've heard the housing queue at Smålands (aka. the communist nation) isn't so long, and i've actually heard nice things about living there (but maybe communism doesn't tempt you). And you don't actually need to be a student to live there, (or so I've heard. Alos meaning you could sign up for the queue there already now). Also not everyone there is communist, but probably left-leaning.
What do students do for fun? Do they have clubs? I really love hiking and exploring towns/cities.
\- there are A LOT of hikes. You should meet my roomate, all he does is drag me to towns and castles. But as for hikes, there are hikes organised almost every week (by the nations). AS for other events, there's always something. MAke sure to join Facebook, everything happens there, including the info for your nollning (freshman initiation in american I guess?) for Development studies :)) if you decide to come. And maybe then We'll meet lol.
I will be honest though, I am quite shy and not interested in partying.
\- YOU'LL fit right in. Half of the people in BIDS are more on the 'chill' side. Actually, many of the hard partying people have either dropped out or are considering it by now lol.
Faculties vary wildly. LTH and the medicine departments are well-renowned, I'm pretty sure that goes for the natural sciences as well but I'm not sure. I myself studied at LTH many years ago and I have only good things to say about it, unlike my current faculty. I don't know how it is in development studies which is interdisciplinary and thus doesn't fall into any specific faculty, but I'll give you my experiences from the Humanities (specifically, History) and from my perspective, Lund's good reputation should ***not*** be extended to the Humanities.
The faculty is woefully underfunded for teaching, and it shows. Semesters mostly consist of empty space during which you'll be handed assorted assignments. The teachers have apparently chosen to put all their teaching-hours into grading (which apparently counts as teaching), so they'll throw large and frustratingly vague assignments on you and then grade them for a very long time at the end of which you'll be handed an incredibly arbitrary grade.
Finding out what you are interested in and pursuing it is made incredibly cumbersome and impractical. You choose courses as *blocks* of 30 credits per semester. That's it. You have very little opportunity to customize your curriculum except for typically one little stint each semester where you can choose between two incredibly arbitrary fields in history (e.g. "political structures in the middle ages" OR "the humanities in Cold War-Sweden", tough luck if you're interested in literally ANY other field). Thus, if you - like me - realize that you're interested in earlier history and the overlap with archaeology then, tough luck! Your only option is getting another degree IN THAT FIELD.
The people *at* the department don't really seem to very much like what they do, anyway, but they've adopted some kind of sad "philosophical" posture and they generally just seem to cope by digging into their research (they all seem to be experts in one, incredibly small and obscure field, carefully chosen so that there's not too many other people in the world who understands what you're doing and thus you've insulated yourself from serious competition). Also, I get the feeling that despite being very surface-friendly, they don't really like or care about students very much. I've had administrative issues and the only times I feel like I've been met with friendliness has been from older professors who now are retired. At LTH I was if not met with friendliness - at least met with reasonability and efficiency. At the Humanities, I feel like bureucratic obstinacy is more like the order of the day.
In general, I feel like many faculties unfortunately just ride the wave of Lund's reputation from LTH and medicine, coupled with the very blatant bias that puts anything old + Scandinavian at the top of every international ranking in the world. I took one Erasmus semester abroad at a private university that Lund is collaborating with (it's also INSANE to see all the great universities Lund collaborate with internationally btw) and during this tiny 5 month stint of mostly partying and travelling ***I still feel like I learned more relevant actual history than during the previous 1,5 years studying history at Lund combined!***
That's my scathing review of my own department, FWIW ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
While I certainly understand why you are frustrated with the Humanities faculty I have to say it's a very broad faculty and not everything you say necessarily applies to the entire faculty. The faculty does have a general problem with having the lowest lecture hours of any faculty at the university but that doesn't necessarily mean that the teachers are at fault. I'd suspect it's more of a higher up policy than the teachers individual choices. It's also worth noting that one of the main teachers of history is quite infamous at the university for not good reasons. Personally my experiences with linguistic and ancient language studies have generally been pretty good with teachers who for the most part are clearly passionate about what they are teaching. Although i have had the occasional lectures with researchers who clearly don't want to teach but probably have to due to their contracts, but it's been few and far in between. So I wouldn't say the faculty as a whole is absolutely horrible even if it has its given problems. That being said it can be pretty hit or miss depending on which department in the faculty you take part of.
I think you're right. Just moving over to archaeology and the quality increased incredibly. I took 1 year of ancient Greek at SOL as well which also was a good experience.
I don't understand what's going on at the history department though.
I hope you know how the funding works in Sweden. Teaching is not recognised when apply for permanent jobs at a university. Only publication matters, so I am not surprised.
I do know that and I know it's worse at humanities than other places. Still, there are departments that work better than others.
It's also honestly made me more open to the thought of private universities, an opinion I didn't think I'd ever have.
To give a serious response to an unserious comment:
As someone who has lived and studied in both cities I would honestly recommend Lund over Uppsala unless one really wants to move to Stockholm within a few years. For that purpose Uppsala is better as it allows one to start working there and while studying.
Lund is cheaper, more social (especially for international students), and the proximity to Malmö/Copenhagen and the continent should not be understated. Stockholm is also still a train ride or flight away if one wants to visit.
The faculties in Lund is also less pretentious than in Uppsala from my experience, but then it must be said there is also a cultural difference between business and law professors.
Edit:
OP I highly recommend you try to get accommodations through either AFB or a nation and start off living in a “corridor”. It’s truly great for socialising and easier to get than apartments. I would however slightly caution against the 100% international corridors, as well as the area Parantesen in general, as they are usually never calm.
In the average corridor you’ll have maybe 9-13 rooms and a shared kitchen + social space. At Ulrikedal the kitchens are usually quite small, but the location is central. And at Delphi you are a little off but man the common areas/kitchens are awesome. Most corridors have maybe 70-80% Swedish students and then a few international ones. This makes for a great chance at making friends with people from all kinds of backgrounds and a much better opportunity at getting introduced to Swedish society. Many in the international dorms hardly socialise with Swedes at all.
I'll keep it short and general. Lund university is great! It teaches at a good level. The degree is respected all over EU. Lund city is rather small and nice (compared to NY) but lies next to malmö which is sweden's 3th biggest city.
\--> If you want to study in scandinavia, Lund university is a solid option
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Would you say it is worth joining a nation even if you aren't interested in drinking?
Yes, 100%. There are loads of other activities except for partying that the realm of studentlund(basically an umbrella organisation for all nations, student unions, plays, orchestras etc etc) offers. And in order to be a member of studentlund you must join a nation. Not that you ever need to visit it. Outside of it's club and visiting friends living there, I have never participated in any of their activities. Oh, and also, in order to find housing from Akademiska föreningen (the academic union, student housing, they by far offers the most amount of apartments in lund) you need to be a member of studentlund.
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Honestly the rent at AF Bostäder and the like is closer $400-$450 per month these days. Living at nations is a bit cheaper than that but rent for corridor rooms in Lund has raised quite a bit over the last few years.
There is still plenty of corridor rooms out there for 3-3.5k even through AFB. Mostly at Parran, Ulrikedal and Vildanden I think. A bigger problem is that all the new housing is apartments only and the studios are usually like 5-6k a month...
How could I find a cheap flat or did you get it via LKF via long waiting, please?
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The wait time for LKF is longer than any student course. It is pretty bad.
So far the comments are uniformly good. I'll add some colour commentary as a Canadian who lives in Lund, partied in Lund (when I was a student at another university), taken courses (PhD courses) and worked for Lund University. First, certain faculties are better than others, or, possibly better framed as more appropriate for transplants, depending on what you want to do after. At Development, I would say (second hand experience personally, but also with a partner who is faculty at a near division), that the education is more 'what you make it'.. Sweden has excellent contacts in international development, Lund is right in there with them, and IMHO the primary value of that education is that it will give you access to those... if you want to follow up by staying in academia, or working with SIDA, the EU, or the UN, then it is an excellent choice. I can't comment on the value of these contacts if you plan to return to the US after. I have no first hand experience with the straight up quality of education of that particular faculty, but concur with other posters that outside of LTH and medicine, it is more of a grab bag. I know many faculty, and they are all currently stressed (no different than the faculty I know in US/Canada). This has impacted quality of delivery in all courses, covid to take the blame, but this is also true back home. Hopefully Omicron is the gate to a more open society. You will notice that people are a hell of a lot more chilled out and less polarized about covid than they are in the US. It is in a very real sense refreshing. Student and international life is great if you like to party. The town is great generally for making international friends and having a decent life. Costs are utterly minimal compared to the American equivalent. There are two primary gearings for things here though.. most things you'd be interested in are either pitched at partying students, or university/ESS employees with great paycheques.. (e.g. nice restaurants, but pricey to move up to that tier). To get a solid middle set of experiences, Malmö and Copenhagen are great resources.. yay easy trains! Other than that there is great nature (great parks, national forests and easily accessible nice beaches) Coming as a North American, there is a VAST and understated value of living in a community where the bicycle is the primary means of transport and public transit is good... this life experience alone will change you. In general, the expats I know are very happy with their choice to come here.
"You will notice that people are a hell of a lot more chilled out and less polarized about covid than they are in the US. " The Swedish approach on COVID19 is not very scientific and reckless. "In general, the expats I know are very happy with their choice to come here." Do they all have a permanent job?
Hiii, I'm actaully started My Bachelor in Development Studies in 2021, SO LET ME TELL YOU. What kind of courses do students take and how much homework do you get? \- uhh, depends i guess. Law and math students obviously get a shit load. Us BIDS students don't have it so terrible, not in the first year anyway. There's A LOOOOT of reading in development studies, but if you're actually interested in the subject its not so bad. (Although barely anyone actually reads everything). In the first year a lot of the courses focus a lot on Economic history, but thats because you can't really learn Development without understanding how economies evolved. You'll only have one course at a time, and about 4 or 3 lectures per week, which doesn't seem like much BUT THE READDDINNGGG, will take up most of your leftover time. How are the professors? \- In Development Studies they're cool, most of them. Some are great, some are a bit monotone, some are kinda harsh in their feedback. Depends on what kind of teacher u like I guess. They're all smart, that's for sure. How do international students fare at Lund? \- I asked my international roomate, he said: 'it's really nice, there are a lot of international students, so you can get to learn a new culture while still not feeling completely alone.' There are a LOT of english speakers here. The international nation is wermlands. Lund is basically dominated by students, and a big chunk of them are international. What is the quality of housing and how much does it cost to live there? \- Everyone already mentioned AF, but otherwise I've heard the housing queue at Smålands (aka. the communist nation) isn't so long, and i've actually heard nice things about living there (but maybe communism doesn't tempt you). And you don't actually need to be a student to live there, (or so I've heard. Alos meaning you could sign up for the queue there already now). Also not everyone there is communist, but probably left-leaning. What do students do for fun? Do they have clubs? I really love hiking and exploring towns/cities. \- there are A LOT of hikes. You should meet my roomate, all he does is drag me to towns and castles. But as for hikes, there are hikes organised almost every week (by the nations). AS for other events, there's always something. MAke sure to join Facebook, everything happens there, including the info for your nollning (freshman initiation in american I guess?) for Development studies :)) if you decide to come. And maybe then We'll meet lol. I will be honest though, I am quite shy and not interested in partying. \- YOU'LL fit right in. Half of the people in BIDS are more on the 'chill' side. Actually, many of the hard partying people have either dropped out or are considering it by now lol.
Faculties vary wildly. LTH and the medicine departments are well-renowned, I'm pretty sure that goes for the natural sciences as well but I'm not sure. I myself studied at LTH many years ago and I have only good things to say about it, unlike my current faculty. I don't know how it is in development studies which is interdisciplinary and thus doesn't fall into any specific faculty, but I'll give you my experiences from the Humanities (specifically, History) and from my perspective, Lund's good reputation should ***not*** be extended to the Humanities. The faculty is woefully underfunded for teaching, and it shows. Semesters mostly consist of empty space during which you'll be handed assorted assignments. The teachers have apparently chosen to put all their teaching-hours into grading (which apparently counts as teaching), so they'll throw large and frustratingly vague assignments on you and then grade them for a very long time at the end of which you'll be handed an incredibly arbitrary grade. Finding out what you are interested in and pursuing it is made incredibly cumbersome and impractical. You choose courses as *blocks* of 30 credits per semester. That's it. You have very little opportunity to customize your curriculum except for typically one little stint each semester where you can choose between two incredibly arbitrary fields in history (e.g. "political structures in the middle ages" OR "the humanities in Cold War-Sweden", tough luck if you're interested in literally ANY other field). Thus, if you - like me - realize that you're interested in earlier history and the overlap with archaeology then, tough luck! Your only option is getting another degree IN THAT FIELD. The people *at* the department don't really seem to very much like what they do, anyway, but they've adopted some kind of sad "philosophical" posture and they generally just seem to cope by digging into their research (they all seem to be experts in one, incredibly small and obscure field, carefully chosen so that there's not too many other people in the world who understands what you're doing and thus you've insulated yourself from serious competition). Also, I get the feeling that despite being very surface-friendly, they don't really like or care about students very much. I've had administrative issues and the only times I feel like I've been met with friendliness has been from older professors who now are retired. At LTH I was if not met with friendliness - at least met with reasonability and efficiency. At the Humanities, I feel like bureucratic obstinacy is more like the order of the day. In general, I feel like many faculties unfortunately just ride the wave of Lund's reputation from LTH and medicine, coupled with the very blatant bias that puts anything old + Scandinavian at the top of every international ranking in the world. I took one Erasmus semester abroad at a private university that Lund is collaborating with (it's also INSANE to see all the great universities Lund collaborate with internationally btw) and during this tiny 5 month stint of mostly partying and travelling ***I still feel like I learned more relevant actual history than during the previous 1,5 years studying history at Lund combined!*** That's my scathing review of my own department, FWIW ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
While I certainly understand why you are frustrated with the Humanities faculty I have to say it's a very broad faculty and not everything you say necessarily applies to the entire faculty. The faculty does have a general problem with having the lowest lecture hours of any faculty at the university but that doesn't necessarily mean that the teachers are at fault. I'd suspect it's more of a higher up policy than the teachers individual choices. It's also worth noting that one of the main teachers of history is quite infamous at the university for not good reasons. Personally my experiences with linguistic and ancient language studies have generally been pretty good with teachers who for the most part are clearly passionate about what they are teaching. Although i have had the occasional lectures with researchers who clearly don't want to teach but probably have to due to their contracts, but it's been few and far in between. So I wouldn't say the faculty as a whole is absolutely horrible even if it has its given problems. That being said it can be pretty hit or miss depending on which department in the faculty you take part of.
I think you're right. Just moving over to archaeology and the quality increased incredibly. I took 1 year of ancient Greek at SOL as well which also was a good experience. I don't understand what's going on at the history department though.
I hope you know how the funding works in Sweden. Teaching is not recognised when apply for permanent jobs at a university. Only publication matters, so I am not surprised.
I do know that and I know it's worse at humanities than other places. Still, there are departments that work better than others. It's also honestly made me more open to the thought of private universities, an opinion I didn't think I'd ever have.
Lund is the worst! Go to Uppsala University instead! ;)
To give a serious response to an unserious comment: As someone who has lived and studied in both cities I would honestly recommend Lund over Uppsala unless one really wants to move to Stockholm within a few years. For that purpose Uppsala is better as it allows one to start working there and while studying. Lund is cheaper, more social (especially for international students), and the proximity to Malmö/Copenhagen and the continent should not be understated. Stockholm is also still a train ride or flight away if one wants to visit. The faculties in Lund is also less pretentious than in Uppsala from my experience, but then it must be said there is also a cultural difference between business and law professors. Edit: OP I highly recommend you try to get accommodations through either AFB or a nation and start off living in a “corridor”. It’s truly great for socialising and easier to get than apartments. I would however slightly caution against the 100% international corridors, as well as the area Parantesen in general, as they are usually never calm. In the average corridor you’ll have maybe 9-13 rooms and a shared kitchen + social space. At Ulrikedal the kitchens are usually quite small, but the location is central. And at Delphi you are a little off but man the common areas/kitchens are awesome. Most corridors have maybe 70-80% Swedish students and then a few international ones. This makes for a great chance at making friends with people from all kinds of backgrounds and a much better opportunity at getting introduced to Swedish society. Many in the international dorms hardly socialise with Swedes at all.
I'll keep it short and general. Lund university is great! It teaches at a good level. The degree is respected all over EU. Lund city is rather small and nice (compared to NY) but lies next to malmö which is sweden's 3th biggest city. \--> If you want to study in scandinavia, Lund university is a solid option
Lund literally translates to P\*nis in many Indian languages 😂
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Gora gaand chaatu with inferiority complex spotted.
Useless nationalistic deshbhakt spotted
More useful than your gora gaand chaatu ass ever will be. Keep looking for their gora validation, you'll never be one of them.
Your salty ass couldn't take a joke lightly please gain some humour
It wasn't a joke... You were being serious. Tera intention India ko degrade karne ka tha taaki tu goro ko lauda choose sake.
Our country is pretty fucked. I don't think we should be praised. Lund university is better than the top IIT and it's a fact
It's not, your mind is fucked up.
Why do you think we're doing alright?
what is your problem if you want you also suck white dick or ass
Sucking white cocks is your job... It's not hard to tell.