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CORE COURSE WEEK

Last week was core course week. This is the first time you get to travel as a core course. Normally, you go to Western Denmark or Sweden for half the week and stay in Copenhagen for the other half.

 

For my class, we spent the first three days in Copenhagen and traveled to Skive and Århus, which is the second largest city in Denmark, for the second half. The idea of core course week is to take learning outside of the classroom and help core courses bond.

 

All my friends who had previously studied at DIS told me they made really close friends in their core courses. To be honest, I didn’t see that happening in my core class. I’m in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism, and while I really liked my class, our professor separated us into groups on the first day and I felt like those were the only people I knew. But core course week completely changed this.

 

We started off the week in Copenhagen. We had a guest speaker talking about Denmark’s model of preventing radicalization, we watched a documentary, ate lunch as a class, and visited a Mosque in Nørrebro. The first half of the week was long but interesting.

 

On Thursday we traveled to Århus. Here we saw the Jelling Stones and has a guest lecture from a Ph.D. student at the University of Århus. We walked around the city, which is a quainter version of Copenhagen and had dinner as a class.

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Getting to spend time with my classmates and my professor outside of class was really fun and I started to get to know everyone in my class.

 

The next day we had the opportunity of going to the Explosive Ordinance Demolition Regiment of the Danish Army in Skive. This building isn’t normally open to the public, so we were very privileged to go there. As a mostly pacifist individual, it was definitely odd to be surrounded by bombs and technology that is used to disarm them but was interesting nonetheless.

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Later that day we continued to explore Århus and went bowling at night as a class. It’s weird but in only a couple of days I not only learned the names of everyone in my class, but I genuinely got close to a lot of them.

On our last day, we had a dialogue with members of a radical Mosque and walked around Bazar Vest, a shopping area created by immigrants. The food was unbelievable and everyone was so welcoming and nice.

Of course, we also went to ARoS Art Museum. If you know anyone who has studied abroad with DIS you are bound to have seen photos of the iconic rainbow tunnel. We had a guided tour of an exhibit in the museum and had some time to explore the rest. I love modern art museums and ARoS was no exception.

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Overall, core course week was absolutely exhausting, especially since I got sick during it. But it was an amazing experience to bond as a class and explore a different part of Denmark. I can’t wait for our long Study Tour in Dublin and Belfast. I love that DIS places such an emphasis on traveling and learning outside the classroom.

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