Kajsa, 24 · Sweden
University of Technology Sydney (UTS) · Sydney, Australia
Program: Business and Law · Semester abroad via Beyond Abroad
Kajsa is the kind of person who has always known, roughly, what she wants. A clear degree path, a plan for after graduation, a sense of where things are heading. So when the opportunity to study abroad in Australia came up, she did not agonize over it. She saw it for what it was. A chance to keep studying while finally living somewhere completely different. She applied. She got in. And then she flew to the other side of the world.
Arriving at UTS
The University of Technology Sydney sits right in the city center, a few minutes walk from the CBD. When Kajsa arrived on campus for the first time, the scale of it struck her immediately. Big, modern, and full of students from what felt like everywhere in the world. Sweden had not quite prepared her for that.
The academic structure took some adjusting too. Back home, Kajsa was used to taking one course at a time, finishing it, then moving to the next. At UTS, she was taking four courses in parallel. Continuous assessments spread across the term replaced the single final exam she was used to. It was a different rhythm, and she had to build new study habits to keep up.
Her favorite turned out to be Managing Risk and Opportunity, partly for the content, partly for the teacher. Business and law are not obvious companions, but the mix worked. Alongside that, she was taking Business and Social Impact, Marketing and Customer Value, and Introduction to Law. Four courses, four threads of assessment, all running at once.
The corridor that changed everything
Before leaving Sweden, Kajsa had decided she wanted to live on campus. Not in a private apartment. Not with a group of Swedes she already knew. In a shared corridor where she would actually have to meet people. She ended up at Yura Mudang, the student housing connected to UTS, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with five others from France, the US, Australia, Taiwan, and India.
It was, by any measure, exactly what she had hoped for.
"I'd recommend applying for a room in a corridor or shared housing, since it gives you a really good opportunity to get to know other students naturally. You also develop your English faster and really get that classic exchange semester feeling."
She had seen friends from Sweden take the other approach: finding accommodation on-site through Facebook groups, often with other Swedes, which she understood. It is comfortable and familiar. But Kajsa had come to Australia to be somewhere genuinely new. Having her housing sorted before she landed, and having neighbors from five different countries from day one, made that possible in a way nothing else could.
Sydney, in all its versions
Part of what Kajsa kept coming back to when talking about her time in Sydney was the sheer variety of the place. On any given day, she could be in the city, moving between markets, coffee shops, and restaurants. Study abroad in Australia does that to a schedule. The next day, she could be at a beach, swimming in the ocean and doing very little else. The day after that, she could be on a trail through a national park, an hour from the city, with nobody around.
"Sydney is a fantastic city that really has everything. It's a vibrant metropolis with a fast pace, but at the same time it's close to both beach and sea, which makes it easy to unwind in everyday life."
She made a point of using weekends well. Royal National Park, about an hour south of the city, became a regular. The coastal walks and clifftop trails are genuinely beautiful. The fact that they sit so close to a major city still feels slightly improbable. Further north, the Blue Mountains offered something different: a few hours by train, views that stretch further than you can process, and the sense that you have left the city behind entirely.
The Queensland trip
During a semester break, Kajsa and a group of friends flew to Cairns and drove down the coast. The Whitsundays, Rainbow Beach, K’gari, Noosa, Byron Bay. A string of places that each had something the last one did not. The Great Barrier Reef was on the itinerary, and so was sailing, and so was the kind of driving that feels more like moving through a landscape than navigating between destinations.
It is the kind of trip that probably would not have happened any other way. That is part of what makes studying abroad in Australia so specific. Not because it was complicated to organize, but because it required being in Australia, with the right people, with enough time. Study abroad in Australia has a particular advantage in this regard: the country itself is the surrounding material, and it is remarkable.
What she is taking home
Kajsa is heading back to Sweden with a semester abroad in Australia behind her, ready to finish her master’s degree, with a summer job in Halmstad first, and then one final year in Linköping. The plan is intact. But something about the plan looks different now, even if the shape of it has not changed.
When Kajsa reflects on why the semester worked so well, she keeps coming back to a few things. The decision to live in shared housing. Saying yes, even when staying in would have been easier. Going alone, which meant she had to build her own version of Sydney from scratch.
"Go. You won't regret it. Of course it feels a little scary to move to the other side of the world alone, far from family and friends, and it's completely normal to feel a bit homesick sometimes. But it's so worth it. You grow so much as a person, meet people from all over the world, and get to experience so much that's new. For me, it's been my best six months so far."
Best six months so far. That qualifier matters. Not best six months ever, with the finality that implies. So far, with the implication that the bar has been raised, and that what comes next will have to measure up to something Kajsa did not know she was capable of until she did it.
Inspired by Kajsa’s story? Explore Beyond Abroad programs in Sydney and across Australia.