Colonia and LiU

When you live in the United States and choose to go into education for your profession, you never expect to work for a private business in Europe, but through a unique set of circumstances, my career path recently took me from the University of Washington in Seattle to Linköping University and a private real estate company developing the new student housing project in the north-west corner of campus, affectionately named "Colonia" by the students.

Without going into details, my job in both places has been to work closely with student living environments in order to make them as quality and educational as possible, a living and learning community, which is an expectation with University-owned student housing in the U.S., but a new concept here in Sweden where student housing is traditionally wholly separate from the educational experience. In short, this concept is "on-campus student life meets the living place" and hopefully, a richer and fuller learning experience is the result.

Not wanting to mix business with pleasure, I have purposely left my job and profession outside of the blog arena so far, but I figured it was time to come forth with that which I spend a whole lot of time on during the week. It's been a pleasure to get to know Swedish students and begin to see the goals for this project realized just a half-year into my two-year Swedish educational experience.

The pictures above attest to the new living environment at Linköping University ("LiU") as well as some of the student residents, the first to take the plunge into on-campus living. I've found the students and staff at LiU to be highly competent and focused individuals, making this an exciting place in which to begin a new season of work and life.

Jag har inte glömt om min svenskaspråk, alla i Sverige. Nu, jag tar min andra svenskakurs på Folkuniversitetet och snart, snart jag ska skriva min blogg (bara en blogg) på svenska. Också min pappa ska kommer till Linköping från Prag denna helg och vi ska gå till Cloetta Center att titta sista spelen med "LHC." Vi ses på Cloetta Center, vänner!

(For those of you who found this blog a little hard to read, trust me, I can't stand it when Blogger messes with me. It's important for the blog writer to make the blog as easy to read as possible for the readers and that usually means separate paragraphs! If I could, I would. When I save something as a draft, then come back to it, Blogger seems to take over. If any of you have advice, I would welcome it. No more drafts, that's for sure....)