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Published Dec 1, 2021

My name is Mallory MacDonald, and I am a senior honors student double majoring in biology and psychology with a minor in statistics in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. While that sounds like I should be going to medical school, studying abroad changed my trajectory. I took classes outside my comfort zone and fell in love with International Humanitarian Law. I will now be attending law school in my future.

There is this new phrase that I’m trying to add to my everyday vernacular. Kinda similar to YOLO, it goes something like, “It was for the plot.” Sadly, I stumbled onto this saying after I was back in the states on TikTok. However, it still describes my experience wonderfully.

To begin, this expression indicates that I have control over how I write my story. That’s exactly what I was able to do during my study abroad experience.  This past summer, I took classes in Copenhagen, Denmark, through the Danish Institute of Study Abroad, or DIS for short. Originally, I choose this program in the Fall of 2019. The class that drew me in was called The Neuroscience of Fear. The program had added in a weeklong study tour to Munich, Germany where students were going to have a tour of Dachau, the first concentration camp. As a biology and psychology double major, this class was going to be an amazing opportunity. Due to COVID-19, I went during the Summer of 2021 when this class was no longer offered due to travel restrictions. This gave me my first time to change up my plotline! The class I took instead was Humanitarian Law and Armed Conflict. During the class, I thought maybe I would go into law as a joke; however, now, I don’t think it’s a joke anymore. I just took my first practice LSAT two days ago.

While I was in class for four hours a day (which felt like the biggest inconvenience), most of my day was spent exploring the city. I spent afternoons walking up and down Stroget, a walking street dedicated to shopping, in different museums learning about the history and culture of Scandinavia, or exploring castles. While roughly 40% of their workforce travels to work by bicycle, I decided to get a metro card. I made it a goal, though, to ride a bike at least for a full day to get as close to the experience as possible. One of my favorite days! The story starts when I mentioned to a classmate of mine that I wanted to ride bikes to a small fishing village south of Copenhagen. She wanted to come and invited a couple of her flatmates. From there, I rode 40 minutes on a bike to a town I didn’t know much about with people that I just met that morning. We ended that adventure by going to eat at Reffen. I have never had parmesan fries as tasty as these. Reffen is the largest street food venue in the Nordic! It sits right on the harbor with a wonderful viewpoint of the sunset if you stay late enough (the sun sets around 9:58 p.m. which also happens to be when the last bus leaves the area too). My roommate got a tattoo here. I talked to some Danish Royal Guards. Good food, good times, and a great place to make TikToks. I’ll end this story with some advice. Take the random classes. Invite the stranger. Try the food. Say yes (but be safe).

The second reason I use the “It was for the plot” expression is because it’s a positive outlook for when something does not go right. For example, your tour bus gets stuck in the sand – it was for the plot. You rent a car and make a wrong turn and end up somewhere you didn’t plan to – it was for the plot. One Tuesday, I planned to have a quiet night finishing homework. That was before some friends from the building walked in and asked if I wanted to jump into the harbor. How could I say no? The plot was going to be better if I said yes. Also, I just love the water. I changed into my swimsuit so quickly. There were about five of us that jumped in all at once. We quickly learned that the water was about 58 degrees Fahrenheit, a.k.a cold! After that experience, I soon learned that most Danes jump in on a hot day after they get off work (not at night after an average temp day).

Another aspect of my study abroad experience that I could not control was COVID-19. I was lucky enough to be one of the students to get to travel in 2021. The first five days that I was in Copenhagen were spent in quarantine in my flat. This gave me that opportunity to get to know who I was living with very well. I experienced jet lag during this time the most. I got the opportunity to see how another country dealt with COVID, how they loosened their restrictions and their attitudes towards the vaccination. COVID-19 has added to my study abroad experience. Before studying abroad, I heard of students traveling all around Europe on their weekends off, going to Paris, Barcelona or Amsterdam. It would have been amazing to get to travel to all those places. Instead of spending 48 hours traveling to and spending time in another county, I got to visit different cities and towns within Denmark. About a two-hour drive south of Copenhagen is a nature reserve called Mons Klint where about 30 DIS students went camping one weekend. Roskilde is about an hour and a half train ride and houses the Viking Ship Museum. During the week-long class trip, we went all across Denmark on the tour bus. During this week, I saw the second-largest city in Denmark, stayed a night in my teacher’s hometown, and went to a beach near the northernmost point of the country.

All in all, the stories that you remember most aren’t going to be the adventures that you planned for but the ones that you stumbled upon.

Published 06 August 2021

I’m Mallory MacDonald, a rising senior honors student. I study psychology and biology in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. During the summer of 2021, I studied in Denmark through the Danish Institute for Study Abroad.

Ok, I’ve finally made it to Denmark after 15 hours of travel, three plane rides, and standing in a 2-hour long line to get a COVID test. But, I still have five days of quarantine in my apartment. I’m one of the lucky students that get to quarantine with 8 other strangers instead of a hotel by myself. But, maybe hotel food would have been better than learning to online shop in a foreign language. One of those first nights, the nine of us gathered around our dining table (probably bought from IKEA) and played a drinking game called BUZZED with water. One of the cards said, “Drink if you have ever studied abroad and it changed your life.” At this point, none of us could say anything. However, that is still one of the most iconic moments of the trip. It was the first time that any of us were actually in another country doing the thing that people talk about changing their whole life.

During Summer 2021, I went to Copenhagen, Denmark for six weeks through the Danish Institute for Study Abroad, or DIS. I choose this program because of the classes they offered. However, once in Denmark, I fell in love with the location. My classes were on the busiest streets in the middle of Copenhagen. There was no AC in our classrooms, so we kept the windows open. This probably got in the way of my learning because I was listening to the city pass by outside. The first three-week course I took was The Psychology of Criminal Behavior. Each day we had a guest speaker come in to talk about their experience with criminals in Denmark. It was an interesting class because criminal behavior and how it is treated is very different in Scandinavia. This course covered a psychology elective I needed for my degree. The second course, Humanitarian Law and Armed Conflict, I took because it sounded very interesting and unlike any class I have taken before. My advice: take the random class. I learned more in this class than … than … my intro to psychology course.

My housing building mostly held other DIS students, which I enjoyed. DIS offered two other types of housing options: staying with a host family or a Kollegium, where you would live with other Danish students. Each offers different pros and cons. However, there is a multitude of reasons why I love my housing. For starters, it was two blocks away from Nyhavn, the most pictured place in Copenhagen. Secondly, the first thing I saw out of quarantine were trampolines. Yep, you read that correctly! Copenhagen has sidewalk trampolines right along the harbor.

To travel around the city, I get a metro card. While 40 percent of the Copenhagen workforce uses their bikes to get to work, I thought using a metro card would be a big enough lesson for me while I was there. And I was right! The first day we had in-person classes I got on a train going the opposite direction. Being late to the class taught me to know to take the right train with more time than needed. Public transportation also became the one place that I needed to wear a mask after my first three weeks there. COVID-19 did not take away from my study abroad trip but added to it. It was very eye-opening to see people’s attitudes towards different policies put in place or the vaccination. My program also limited the travel that we could do to other countries. While it was not appreciated during the moment, I’ve come to appreciate it since I’ve been back, allowing me to explore Denmark. I went to Aarhus, the second-largest city, where one of my teachers grew up, a nature reserve with beautiful cliffs called Mons Klint, a Viking village, a fishing town, Kronborg Slot (aka Hamlet’s Castle). All places that I would not have seen if I would have been allowed to travel to different countries.

My study abroad experience was not what I dreamed how it would be in 2019 when I first applied. However, in 2021, it was so much better than I could have ever imagined! And it for sure changed my life!