Today we went to an interview with an organization that is called STS. It was a relief that their office actually is located in Gothenburg because now we actually knew where to go – Kyrkogatan. So this time we didn’t have to make a time plan and a what-to-do-if-we-get-lost plan; everything went really smoothly. They had told us to drop by at 3, so 10 minutes to 3 we were standing outside their door. It’s better to be early than late, right?

We decided that today Alice would take notes because she’s a faster writer, and you can actually see what she writes when she’s stressed – compared to Frida’s handwriting which is more or less unreadable. When they let us in into the office we got an unexpected surprise; there was a cake on the table! Hungry as we usually are, we both accepted a piece of the delicious cake. Then we got to work. The interview took about an hour and as expected we got all the information needed for the handbook. We also found out that there’s one thing with STS that makes it different from the other organizations – they have a meeting with the student that is about to go away to another country as an exchange student and it’s parents before the student leave Sweden. In this meeting both the student and the parents can ask questions about expectations and worries for the upcoming year abroad; in this way we believe that the student as well as the parents will feel more relaxed and know what to expect.

Now we got all the information that we need from the four organizations. So our next assignment will be to find previous exchange student and interview them about their year abroad. But we have learned through the interviews with the organizations that the majority of the students go to the United States (about 85 %). Therefore we believe that it’s really important to also find students to interview that went to another country, so we get other perspectives. Because going as an exchange student to the United States or going to China would be two completely different experiences. We want to find students that went to a completely different culture and learned a completely different language. But of course we will talk to students that went to United States as well, because lets face it – according to the statistics United States is the most popular country to go to.