Student blogs

Your departure day is imminent and soon you will start your new life here in Stockholm. You start making plans and checklists. In doing that, you gathered pre-arrival information, more and more every day, until you find yourself surrounded by too much information that you don’t know where to start. It’s good if you don’t get into that situation, but if you do this reading might just be right for you.

So, here’s what you should do to prevent you from being overwhelmed with pre-arrival information.

1. Get it from the official sources

Any kind of information, whether it’s related to the immigration and civil registration, or study related, make sure that you always trace it back to the official sources, if possible. Sometimes, reasons like long phone answer waiting time, late e-mail reply, or other reasons might hinder you from making the contact. You might feel more comfortable to ask another person directly instead. However, keep in mind that the information you acquired might has already been obsolete so it’s better to get in from the officials.

2. Small-frequent feeding (of information)

Some of you with clinical background might have heard of this term, small-frequent feeding. So, in order to not cause gastric upset, we usually recommend the patient to eat in a smaller portion but more frequently. The same principle could be applied when we look for pre-arrival information. Rather than to look for all the information at one occasion, it might be better for you if you split it into several occasions. Therefore, you will have enough time to really digest the information before moving forward to another theme.

3. Keep your focus

Humans are always full of curiosity and sometimes it can drive us away from our focus. Starting from looking for information about things to do in the first month of arrival, we could unconsciously stretch our search to information about life after studies. From searching cheap flights (or any other eco-friendlier mode of transportations) to Stockholm, we might find ourselves planning for the next Christmas or summer holiday. I’m not saying that this common practice is wrong, but if you only have limited time to prepare your arrival here, this might cause you to lose some of your valuable time.

4. Find your comparable sample

Not everyone comes from the same situation. Maybe you are now pursuing your master’s study directly after graduating from your bachelor’s, maybe you have to leave your job now and come here for further study. Maybe you come alone, maybe you bring companion(s) with you. Each situation might require different adjustments, in migration paperwork, housing, financial planning, and so on. Before you start to overthink it, you might feel better if I tell you that someone else with a similar situation has done it before. Karolinska Institutet houses international and diverse students, so it’s not hard to find a sample that share similar situation as you, maybe even coming from the same country as you. You can always start to look first from the list of KI’s Digital Ambassadors and feel free to reach us.

I hope that you will enjoy your journey through the sea of information. To provide you with better search, you can also use the pre-arrival tag in our page.

Do you have other tips that you think should be listed here? Feel free to write them down in the comment section.

Contact me at:

LinkedIn: Winner Ng

email: winner.ng@stud.ki.se