Andy is Going to Sweden

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Three years. Three strange, winding years. This fall will be, officially, three years since I was supposed to first go abroad for educational purposes and take undergraduate classes in Greece. Four years, really, if you count the planning and preparation I had to go through to prepare to even think about going abroad. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that, you know perfectly well why I did not study abroad in the fall of 2020. On the upside, an extra semester in the cornfields let me get a minor in GIS and take some classes about Louise Erdrich and gay gaming, which was a nice little touch. But now, now, now, after much time and much searching and much living, I am finally going abroad to study after all, and it’s going to be more than just a four-month semester this time around. I am leaving the United States for two whole years.

Let it here be known that, barring any further unforeseen circumstances (trying not to jinx myself this time around), I will be going to Sweden in the fall of 2023. I have accepted (and more importantly, paid for) a position as a graduate student in Stockholm University’s Landscape Ecology program, taking place in Stockholm, Sweden from the fall of 2023 to the spring of 2025.

It has always been my dream, my passion, one of my life’s goals to live abroad. Not just to visit a place for a couple weeks, but to actually live there. Part of the reason is to get out of the United States and the insular suburban bubble I have existed halfway in and hallway out of my entire life. Part of it is to experience other cultures, to see how other people live, and learn more about how to be critical of my own lifestyle and what I take for granted. Part of it is because I just like to travel, and I believe that there is value in personal growth derived from traveling. But now, as a soon-to-be geography student (sort of, anyway) and a long lover of maps, I think that part of my desire to live somewhere and not just travel there is because it’s important to me that I get to really know a space.

For example, I’ve visited Minnesota before I moved there. I knew some of the cool stuff. But I would never have gotten to know Minneapolis and central Minnesota as well as I do now if I haven’t lived here for the last year and a half. Sure, that’s a pretty trite observation; obviously you’ll get to know a place by living there, that’s what you do. But it’s a matter of really immersing yourself in the people, the places, the sights and sounds of a new place that matters to me. I want to know the history, the landscape, the way that this place came to be as it is now instead of, well, something else. I am realizing a tad too late that I am a student of geography, through and through. Or perhaps this is just the right time to be realizing this, as my chosen graduate program is pretty much exactly what I want out of any graduate program.

That’s the really funny thing about this, too. Sweden, as a country, has never actually been at the top of my list of places to visit. I’m not Swedish, as far as I know. I don’t particularly care for IKEA, or their meatballs. I do like Lefse and Norse mythology and the Swedish Chef from the Muppets, but that hardly counts (and I think Lefse is Norwegian, anyway). I don’t even know what’s in Sweden, besides Stockholm, a YouTuber that I like (and it’s not the one you’re thinking of), and a whole bunch of lakes. It’s funny, in a way, that I’m moving from my current home in Minnesota to what is basically just Bigger Minnesota. The Minnesota of the North. 1.3 million Swedes came to Minnesota in the 19th century exactly because Minnesota is so similar to Sweden. So much for seeing lifestyles that are different than mine; I took a look at this American Siberia of a state and said more winter, please!

So the draw to Sweden isn’t actually Sweden itself; at the outset of my plans of traveling somewhere new, I told myself I wanted to challenge myself and find programs that would take me to countries that weren’t European. I wanted to live in spaces that were distinctly non-Western. And you can claim that I’m fetishizing other cultures or something like that, but I think there’s great value in experiencing first-hand how people live in regions that are distinctly different from your home. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting those experiences. I tried, several times, to figure out cost-effective and meaningful ways of living in these news places. The Fulbright didn’t want to take me to India. Twice. To my credit, the people who would have been my sponsors in Kolkata seemed to like me an awful lot. I also tried to teach English in Japan. They shot me down, presumably due to my lack of any knowledge of the Japanese language beyond “NANI??? ゴゴゴゴ“ and my lack of any formal teaching instruction. Can’t blame them, really. But it’s still funny, because neither of those skills are technically required for the program, yet I’ve got to imagine they make a big difference. Why not just say a certain skillset is required? It would have saved me a hell of a lot of time.

Even European programs drop-kicked my ass back across the pond. I applied for an all-expenses-paid program to study in Ireland (which was, admittedly, my first choice of European country to live in, with the Czech Republic a close second), and I think I had a really strong application. Alas, I thought that with the Fulbright, too. And then I got to the interview for the Ireland program which was some sort of weirdo, bass-ackwards asynchronous interview where they tell you a question, you have thirty seconds to think, two minutes to record yourself speaking, and there are no do-overs. It took me precisely ten minutes to utterly brutalize all four interview questions. I am under no pretensions that the interview is exactly why I did not get a call back for that program. But, hell, maybe I would have done better if I wasn’t speaking to my own reflection and they didn’t line-drive questions out of left field. I’m telling you, this one-sided interview went from “Tell us why you want to study in Ireland” to “Please outline your beliefs on the Israel-Palestine conflict but only through the use of dog whistles” in the span of three minutes and a wet fart. That’s not the real question they asked me, of course, because I think they’d sue me if I spelled out what it actually was. But it’s in the same ballpark, trust me. And trust the mixed metaphor. I love basketball.

But the years went by, calendar months flipped past, I graduated college, I moved to Minnesota, I got a job (two jobs, actually), got cats, and the pandemic waned into willfully-ignored background noise (for those of us lucky/stupid enough to be able to afford to ignore it, anyway, myself included). Denials from elite programs piled up, and I was running out of time before I’d be off my parent’s health insurance and have to get a real job. I even tried out American grad school, way back when. It didn’t feel right, those years ago. I’m glad I waited. But even if Minnesota was a gap year that became a gap two-years, it was getting to the point where I couldn’t wait around any longer. The rejections and failures surprised me, at first; I had always been sort of handed success, in a way. Not that I didn’t work hard for it, of course, and not that it didn’t cost me at times (and when it did, it really cost me), but I didn’t really experience any sort of meaningful rejections until I started applying for these programs.

Sure, I can attribute it to a lot of things; butchered interviews, my creative writing portfolio not being up to snuff, different judges every year, my plans for the program not really aligning with the program’s overall vision, I can’t convincingly argue why I should go to one specific country when any of them would do, I’m fighting a pool of the best and brightest from not just the United States, but the entire world, I only know English and broken fourth-grade level Spanish and am therefore effectively limited to English-language programs, you get the picture. And then I found myself facing the prospect of knuckling down for a third cycle of applying to (and likely being rejected by) elite, international programs like the Fulbright or the Mitchell or the Marshall or the Rhodes. Or I could bite the bullet and attend graduate school.

So now I was faced with one easy decision and one tough decision. I wanted to live abroad, and I wanted to go to grad school. If I could go to grad school abroad, and attend an English-language program somewhere else, that would solve two goals with one action. Alright, easy decision right there. Grad school abroad. Great. Love it. Now the tough one: what the hell program do I choose? There’s a huge range of possibilities, hundreds of schools in dozens of countries. But I could break them down into two categories: did I want to do a creative writing/MFA program or a nature-based and profession-focused science program? You could also phrase it this way: did I want to waste $50,000 dollars and two years of my time or did I want to have a job when I graduated? Hmm.

That’s simplifying it a bit, of course. Not every MFA is stupid expensive, but the individual writer’s decision about whether or not to get an MFA is often an excruciating process, balancing whether the time you’d get to write and, more importantly, the workshops and network connections you could make within the industry are worth the usually bonkers cost of attending such a program. I don’t have an MFA, I’ve only ever attended undergraduate-level writing workshops, but there are plenty of authors who have plenty to say on the subject matter. I’ll let them trash it, instead. Plus, a creative writing degree or MFA program really only sets you up for one thing; careers in academia. You will either score a publishing deal and somehow manage to survive on your writing, or you will get a job at a university teaching writing and hope, someday, you can make enough money from your books to leave. At least, that’s the impression I got from a solid handful of my creative writing professors. Although I have met people who have made very successful, very fulfilling writing-driven careers after getting an MFA. They even have careers that are not in academic settings or publishing; one such person is a very close friend and mentor of mine, whose work I respect immensely, and her advice was (paraphrasing here), “You don’t really need an MFA, but they sure are fun.” A lot of the other people I talked to said “They’re great if you can get someone else to pay for it.” Most everyone else outside of academia or literary writing has been kind of down on the programs as a whole. So that’s food for thought.

So the other option, a science or social sciences degree that would be more profession-focused and set me up for a job that wasn’t just unbenefited seasonal work at a nature center for twenty years. This seemed like a better use of my time (and money) overall. I’d have a chance to learn about a subject that I love in greater detail, engage in some really in-depth projects that went beyond the surface-level undergraduate classes that I skated through, and hopefully come out with a degree that could net me a job that was simultaneously well-paid (relatively speaking) and personally fulfilling. I wanted a degree I’d be willing to pay for, as Cheyenne put it. Something that I’d feel comfortable taking out loans on and not feel like I was flushing it away for a publisher’s gamble.

After thinking about it long enough, and after my own past and failed attempts at narrowing things down for American grad schools, I finally settled on looking for geography programs, especially ones that would let me throw some GIS or natural resources management in there. I’d apply for some of those and a handful of creative writing programs, just for shits and giggles. Cast my net wide, as it were, see what money would swim my way. Grad school is cheaper in Europe, sure, but $20,000 is $20,000, and my undergrad scholarships and my college nest egg (thanks, mom and dad) dried up a long time ago. So, A friend of mine from college pulled my attention to the University of Maynooth, in Ireland, which has a stellar geography program. So far, so good. Ireland’s my top country! Seems like a shoo-in.

So where the hell does Sweden come in? They don’t even have fjords! Here’s the thing; this whole time, it sure seems like I’ve been building up to the point where I tell you that Sweden is my last resort. I’m licking the bottom of the horse meat barrel. Hell, it’s not even the horse that’s the problem. Nothing is sacred to me, I’d gladly eat a horse. I’ve certainly had worse. I’ll eat anything once, except maybe brains and owls. But to get back to the point: no, I am not going to Sweden because Ireland rejected me. In fact, it’s almost the opposite; I’m going to Sweden despite the fact that Ireland (and Scotland) accepted me. Now we get to the fun part: I am going to Sweden almost exclusively for the Landscape Ecology program.

I don’t think I can tell you just how perfect this program is for me. I’m not a religious man, but my memory of the moment when I found this program is practically steeped in a sort of glow of divine intervention. My eyes had yet to open before this. It is hard for me to describe the shock and awe and the sound of my jaw smacking the floor as I opened up the innocuous program page and blithely read words that would, in all reality, change my life. “Applied historical ecology, landscape analysis and resource management, linking community ecology with restoration and management”? “Understand and explore the link between ecological processes, landscape patterns and human interactions”? “Applied Remote Sensing, and GIS for Landscape Analysis, 15 credits“???? Holy cow, mama mia, Jiminy Christmas, punch your uncle in the dick; ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Sweden as a country may not have really been on my radar, but it sure as hell just became the center of my radar now.

This shit is my jam. This is what I live for. Nothing else comes close. Class structures designed to mix natural resources management, ecology, and GIS? Projects and electives that allow for the freedom to further customize my learning? And I get a degree for it? I’ve seen classes about landscape ecology smattered around for other universities in Europe; I got real excited once when I checked out a school in Prague with the listing only to realize that a) it was a single class and b) it was in Czech. Veselé Vánoce Svatý Mikuláš! But nobody else seemed to have anything that even remotely resembled a program as tailor-made for me as this one. I found this program and applied for it in January of this year, but even though I didn’t officially make my decision until this last Friday, and I’m still technically waiting to hear back from one other university about possible scholarships, I think part of me already knew there would be only one option. And it’s Sweden.

The last day resembles the first. So, in this weird, roundabout way, perhaps I have been, once again, handed success. Through almost sheer chance, I have found a program that I love, and am willing to pay for, even if it means taking out loans, and should set me up for a career that can support me while being personally fulfilling. When I moved in to Minnesota, a new Metroid game came out. Another one just dropped as I’m leaving. I left Illinois to move north, and now I’m leaving Minnesota to move north once again. I am leaving behind people and places I love, some new, some old, some with more heartbreak than others, some with more regrets than I care to admit. There are things I will miss, things I did not get to do, and opportunities that have passed me by. I am sad to be leaving behind a job that, in some ways, could have been a permanent position for me. I love my current job as a Historical Interpreter. I’ve realized I really enjoy teaching nature and interpreting. But it isn’t meant to last, at least not for me. I knew from the start I would not be staying in Minnesota long-term, just as I knew I would not be in Urbana-Champaign forever. Now, just like then, there are experiences here, too, things that have shaped my life. And I move on, now, all in the hopes of pursuing something that will take me one step closer to being the person I want to be. And every step along the way is something exciting. At least, that’s how I want it. The first day resembles the last.

I’m not giving up on writing, mind you. That’s still a dream, and I do still have that big, delayed news coming. Eventually. I can always write in my spare time; everyone has to have a day job somehow. And as Cheyenne, always the progenitor of good advice that she is, pointed out, an MFA program would likely put even more pressure on me to write. More pressure than I already have (self-imposed), and that’s about the last thing I need. Plus, this new chapter in Sweden should be great for my creativity; I’m sure I’ll stumble across plenty of good stories. Did you know that the Swedes’ equivalent phrase for our American “something smells fishy” is “Att ana ugglor i mossen“? That translates to, roughly, “Suspecting owls in the bog.” It’s too perfect. If that isn’t a sign from the universe, then I don’t know what is.

It may not be the place I first envisioned, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t my choice all the way through. Send me to Valhalla, baby, I’m going to Sweden.