One of the many wonderful resources at Swarthmore is the Global Engagement Office (GEO). The GEO is an office dedicated to supporting Swatties through various international opportunities as well as domestic study away options. About 40% of Swarthmore students study abroad during their time here! Even during freshman year, I knew I wanted to study abroad. The only questions were where and when. 

Then suddenly it was the spring semester of junior year and I was boarding a flight to Copenhagen as part of a program called DIS: Study Abroad in Scandinavia with a close friend. Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, a country in Europe. It’s known as the bicycling capital of the world! My study abroad program was very supportive of students immersing ourselves into Danish culture. 

One of the highlights of Danish culture is a concept called hygge. During the winter months ( December to early March), the weather is usually around the mid-30’s, raining or cloudy. One of the ways Danes combat this is by participating in hygge. It’s where you take time out of your day intentionally to be with those you care about, whether that’s friends, family or other loved ones. A feeling of warmth and coziness is how I’d describe it. It’s a simple yet beautiful concept and is what got me through those cold winter months in Copenhagen. 

Playing Ticket to Ride for the first time or relearning how to bike were all part of the ways hygge taught me how to not let time slip by and truly savor each memory with people I care about. Walking around the neighborhood I called home for five months or catching the sunrise with friends on our very last day in Copenhagen are experiences I will never forget.

And so, I brought the practice of hygge back with me to Swarthmore. Personally, most of my time is spent writing my senior thesis for my Medical Anthropology major, taking a few more biology classes, applying for jobs and figuring out what I want to do post-grad. It can be easy to just spend your days working, revising and planning for the future but then I remember Copenhagen and hygge.

So my friends and I decided to create a poster-board sized senior fall bingo card. We brainstormed different activities that we hadn’t done yet or wanted to do all together as a shared experience. Some ideas included joining a club for the fun of it, watching a football game with the Philadelphia Eagles in it, participating in the Pterodactyl Hunt (a quintessential Swarthmore tradition where the campus turns into a battleground between monsters and hunters for a night) or dining in Philadelphia. We ended up with 25 activities. Did we do them all? No. But that wasn’t really the point. What the bingo card allowed us to do was to transfer hygge from Copenhagen to Swarthmore.

During one of the first weekends of the fall semester, we all huddled together in a dorm to have a board game night. The close friend of mine who also did DIS Copenhagen brought Ticket to Ride to play. And so we played for hours, chatting about who was winning and discussing what else to check off the bingo card.

Some of the activities mentioned we did up completing though! We ended up watching the first home game of the Eagles together though it was pouring rain. We joined a bird walk hosted by the birding club where we walked through Crum Woods looking for any birds (none were found because it was turning dusk). We also participated in the Pterodactyl Hunt and I’ve got my Pterodactyl Hunting License currently hanging up on my dorm wall.

Sitting on the big chair with friends talking about what the future holds for us or grabbing dinner in downtown Swarthmore; it’s these memories I will remember, not the amount of time I spent on assignments or on a final paper. As a senior, where everything seems to change every second, I’ve realized more than ever to not cherish those in my life and to incorporate hygge in my everyday life.