Contrastación de las hipótesis específicas

Watch students arriving for the first time in a functioning social welfare state. They will ease their way into it as if very cold water, watching suspiciously for Communists and bread lines. What they will see instead are a few drunks, noticeable for their rarity, and thousands of people on bikes. After they adjust to the fact that food costs twice as much here and the winter nights are twice as dark, they begin to see what works. In Copenhagen, lots of things work—the streets are clean, the people thin and healthy, the air quality good, and unemployment lines low. For US students in Denmark this is the most mind-blowing thing: that a country can operate successfully on a totally different economic and political system from the United States.

Danish International Studies (DIS) was established in 1959 and is affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. Danish faculty members teach the courses in English, but students must also take Danish language classes. 89% of the students are from the US and can integrate into various forms of Danish culture by either opting for a Danish homestay or a room in akollegium, the Danish dorms. The program runs year-round and the primary objective is that students develop intercultural communication skills. They aren’t just put into a study abroad program, but are asked to constantly re-evaluate their involvement in this strange new culture.

Their home page advertizes “academically challenging courses taught in English,” “Intercultural skills for the global job market,” “Copenhagen as your Home, Europe as your Classroom,” and “Cultural Immersion Through Unique Housing Options.” It is one of the bigger “island” study abroad programs available, hosting 500-575 students each semester. Though the majority of the students come from the USA, many also come from China and Europe (particularly Eastern Europe and Russia). It is one of the few programs to offer classes for science and medical students; it offers a wide variety of classes for business students through Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and the arts and humanities

students have a wide range of classes to choose from.

The director gives some DIS facts. Many students come from private institutions. Five years ago the female-male ratio was 50/50; now it is 70/30, which the director believes is a result of more women getting an education now. However, in the architecture and pre-med programs, the ratio is 50/50. 95% of the humanities students, however, are women.

DIS’s location in the world makes it unique; very few Americans study abroad in Scandinavia. Consequently the ones who come here discover new value systems to consider, like Scandinavian welfare and the environment. Students can ignore national health care and global warming in America. They can’t in Scandinavia—if their host parents don’t remind them of the need for social awareness, the countless bikes, high car and sales taxes, trains, and recycling bins will. In addition, Denmark can offer unique academic perspectives on the students’ subjects. The most popular courses at DIS are Architecture and Design; Humanities; Politics, Pre-med (DIS is one of the few study abroad programs offering science and pre-med classes), Psychology, and Migration and Minorities. Many students also flock to the Hans Christian Andersen class.

The faculty emphasizes high academic output, and the enhancement of intercultural competence. “Twenty percent of the students arrive already interculturally competent, and twenty percent never will be, and are here with a cruise mentality,” the director says. “But sixty percent of the students are changeable, and those are the ones we target.”

Anne Mette Christiansen, and Rikke Kolbech Anderson are both professors of a class called Communication Across Cultures, as well as the DIS interim director for business, and consultant in cultural competencies for DIS. They are at least six feet tall in their boots, skirts, and blonde hair, and look like slightly tamed valkyries.

The students enjoy the discussions of Danish culture, and that the class facilitates what they’re experiencing. “The students had experience of culture but not the chance to

reflect on it,” Anne and Rikke say. “They wanted to get beyond just the experience. The students are going home knowing something about country. If we can contribute to helping young people from the USA to understand there’s another world out there, we are succeeding.”

Some would just like the Danish part to be a little less oppressive—if only they would talk about something besides politics, if only they would talk at all, if only the road signs were not so littered with umlauts and consonants. But mostly, if only she could meet a few of them. While one studies abroad, the failings of the program, if not the country and natives too, is oppressively obvious. In Denmark many of the groceries do not accept American Visa cards, something we do not learn until we have fully bottle-necked the queue in the narrow grocery stores. The food is all expensive and money must be counted out in the hundreds when paying for a small block of pale yellow cheese, biscuits, and Carlsberg. No one goes hungry here except the tourists and those who insist on drinking or injecting their welfare check rather than buying food with it.

The Danish are not unkind, but they don’t go out of their way to speak to the strangers or show us the way or carry the conversation forward when we feel it is their turn to speak. You can speak with a Dane for half an hour without ever learning their name, the students say, and you will never get a Dane telling you his life story. The Danish have a sense of humor though—huge billboards in the metro showed first a photograph of a condom and the Danish word for “life”. The a second photo, of the same condom but now with a safety pin drawn through it, and below the words, “More life.”

The students make complaints: my homestay is far away, my family is not the typical Danish family because there’s no family centre, everyone’s in their rooms with the door shut, it’s hard to meet Danes, it’s hard to talk to Danes. I want more Danish friends. I want to take classes with Danes.

Few however, hate it here or find DIS entirely at fault. Erika, a Biology and English major from New York, finds herself making many unfavorable comparisons between DIS and

her direct enrollment semester in Edinburgh before this. She isn’t crazy about her homestay, and finds herself much more critical of this program, and having a much harder time adjusting to it. In Edinburgh, she lived in a flat with two English students, had a varied circle of friends, and was the only American she knew. Classes had 500 students or more and it felt like in Edinburgh, she knew Edinburgh. At DIS, she’s in an essentially American cultural immersion program where she feels like she’s here to “see the wild Danes out in nature. In Edinburgh, you were just there.”

But she doesn’t have all bad things to say about the program. She admits it is much more academically challenging than her semester in Edinburgh, where she took primarily first-year courses and no science courses. Because she can take science courses at DIS to meet her biology major requirement, she is able to study abroad again.

The Danish family structure also surprises Americans. The independence of the children, the casual commonness of people living with each other, and the fact that sex between teenagers is acceptable if they are in a steady relationship is new, and somewhat shocking for the Americans. New, and somewhat more pleasant is the fact that everything circles back to the family anyway, and the term “coziness”—the national descriptor for when you are indoors with the people you love and all is right with the world.

The students’ own stupidity eventually surprises them the most. Part of their Communications Across Cultures class involves a visit to the Northern House, a culture house for Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. Greenlanders and residents of the Faroe Islands are two totally distinct ethnic groups that look somewhat like a mixture of Native American and Siberian-Asian, and they are ubiquitous in Copenhagen. As former colonial subjects of Denmark, they come with their own social problems. Many Greenlanders sit at the bottom of the social class, tending towards unemployment, alcoholism, and mid-day park benches. The Americans, who barely know how to differentiate an eye slant, weren’t sure what to think of this aspect of Danish culture. “At

the beginning of the semesters,” Anne says, “a lot of the American students ask why there’s so many drunk Japanese lying around on the park benches.”

Students abroad inevitably meet foreigners who know more about America than they do, but students in Denmark seem to experience it all the time. Europeans are generally socially aware, but the Danes seem to absorb knowledge, to be always collecting it. Knowledge puffs up, say the Psalms and the southern Baptists; perhaps the undergrad from North Carolina thinks it too when her host father is reeling off a long list of America’s environmental crimes. She may be thinking it; she may also feel finally, that her deflated ego could use a bit of puffing up. Students who go anywhere return saying, I had no idea how much I didn’t know.