Week 4: Last Week of Winter & Upcoming Deadlines

This week was all about one thing: the application deadline for international students applying through Erasmus. The vibe? Emails, Excel, and a lot of copy‑paste magic.

Monday, the main task of the week was checking Erasmus applications. Over and over. And over. I spent most of the day going through each application: making sure all information was there while copying names, emails, home universities, coordinators, YouTube links and programmes into my beautiful pastel‑coloured Excel table.

I checked CVs, motivation letters, nominations, working links and transcripts – only when everything was complete was my part done. Until then, it was a lot of chasing students for proper CVs and missing transcripts in any of the five languages my boss and I speak between us.

Towards the end of the day I had my Swedish course again, which already felt a lot less confusing than just two weeks ago.

Also it's the last week of snow for the foreseeable future... so walking in the snow was my after work ritual of the week.

Tuesday was all about more applications, more emails, more gentle “Could you please send…” reminders. I continued writing to students about missing CVs and coordinators about nomination letters.

On top of that, I started working through the list of schools KMH collaborates with internationally and prepared a fresh list for the KMH website for next year. That meant researching all partner universities, their international contact details, websites and Erasmus codes and copy‑pasting everything into an Excel sheet, sorting it by name and country, and then turning it into a Word document to make life easier for the web team.

Wednesday began with me continuing that partner‑university list before our weekly team meeting. There I was surprised with Kanelbullar as an early birthday celebration – in Germany that would be bad luck, but in Sweden it’s apparently just very sweet. It was incredibly kind of them.

It was also the first meeting where I understood most of what was being discussed and felt a lot less clueless in general. The rest of the day was filled with more emails and applications – plus a cozy fika with my colleagues.

On Thursday, after answering most emails from incoming students applying to KMH, I helped my colleague Ida with some very necessary but very repetitive work: copy‑pasting and uploading updated Excel tables with the results from the entrance exams for students who want to come to KMH in autumn. Not the most glamorous task, but it saved her a lot of time and she was incredibly thankful.

Afterwards I headed to Swedish class again – this time my brain was a bit slower, mostly because I was tired, but we made it through.

Friday, with the deadline almost here, even more applications came in. My prediction for Monday: way too many last‑minute emails from panicked applicants which will equal so much to do for me!

Södermalm just before sunset

Between that and the excitement for my birthday on Saturday, the day flew by and I was more than ready for the weekend.

When I got home, I was greeted by a birthday package from Germany (which, of course, I did not open until Saturday) and spent the afternoon relaxing in my now snowless city.

Maybe I’ll tell you about how I celebrated my birthday another day… 🎂✨