Today in our weekly CS Pizza talk and discussion series, the CS department hosted a panel of senior CS majors sharing their off-campus study experiences. Five juniors went abroad last year, and four were able to join the lunchtime panel. I was unable to attend because of my daughter’s early school dismissal, but I hear it went really well!

LJ Friedman, who was unable to join the panel due to a conflicting class, offered to write up his experiences. I offered to share it as a guest post in my blog, and here it is!

Hi! My name is LJ Friedman. I’m a senior Computer Science major and am expecting to minor in Psychology, Math, and Music. I chose to study in Copenhagen because of the offered classes and the location. The program had several courses I was interested in that were more niche and/or didn’t exist at Whitman, and I was excited to take a spread of both Computer Science and Psychology courses that covered topics I otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to take. I was primarily interested in the Game Design course, which focused on teaching game design, coding organization, and Unity and C#. There were also Psychology courses that I was particularly interested in, specifically a course on identity, conflict, and discrimination. 

My other reason for choosing Copenhagen is because I have family in Norway, and it was a good opportunity to visit them over the semester. Whitman’s DIS program was actually a big reason why I came to this college — when my older sister was touring here, I ran into a student with Swedish ancestry who was in the process of organizing Whitman’s collaboration with DIS to introduce programs in Scandinavia. We had a great conversation that has stayed with me since then. 

Besides taking the mandatory Danish language course, I also took Game Design and Development as a 6 credit course (with a lab), a course in computer graphics, and the aforementioned identity course. I wasn’t able to take Professor Bares’ class on Interactive Computer Graphics before studying abroad due to schedule conflicts, so I thought it would be a fun opportunity. The other “core” course offered in computer science at DIS Copenhagen is a Neural Networks course, which I was a little less interested in personally, but knew people who took the course and enjoyed it. There were several other cool computer science courses offered, but I wanted to keep my course load lighter for the semester.

It was very interesting to be taught computer science in a different country. One of my professors went to a well-known design university where courses were entirely project-based, and professors were mostly there to assist with the projects they expected students to complete. This led to a very free class structure, where our projects were relatively open-ended as long as they contained certain expected elements to them. In my Graphics course, my professor was taking a lighter teaching load that semester for mental health reasons, and he had previously taught almost every computer science course offered at DIS Copenhagen, so he was a great resource. It was interesting to live in a culture where work-life balance was so normalized — people were very open about what they needed and what they could and couldn’t do, which is very different from the USA, especially in a video game course, where the game development industry is known to be especially toxic to the majority of workers.

For other students considering this program, I think they should know that you may be expected to do a bit more by yourself in your computer science courses. The professors are always happy to help you, but the initial expectation will always be that you work on your projects separately first. On a note unrelated to computer science, you may have a commute that is longer than you expect. (My own commute was 50 minutes by train). The amount that you will be able to use your commute for homework will depend heavily on the method of transportation you use. If you’re on a bus or the metro, it’s probably not going to be easy to do any work. If you are on the trains, they will often be spaces where you can quietly work for the duration of your commute. I heard a lot of advice and information from students, but this was something that still surprised me once I got to Copenhagen.

If you have any questions about my experience at DIS, please email me!