Author: Alton Holscher | Major: Physics | Semester: Spring 2025

A final lunch with the QDev group at Reffen.

My name is Alton Holscher, and I spent the first six months of 2025 in Denmark to conduct physics research as a guest student at the University of Copenhagen (and experience living in the city). This was, frankly, a spur-of-the-moment decision after my PI offered to leverage connections abroad. A semester in Copenhagen seemed preferable to Lausanne, Sweden or Suwon, South Korea due to the appeal of living in–thanks to the Taylor Swift bomb threat in Vienna–the most liveable city in the world. On that front, I have no complaints. I maintained a feeling of “figuring things out as I went” for the entire period in Denmark, but I had no trouble finding transportation, food, medicine, or things to do. The culture shock of going from rural-ish Arkansas to Nordic city is something that I still feel, even now. For much of my life, I’ve romanticized the idea of living in a city due to my parents nostalgia for Chicago and my love of walking around urban areas. The decision to live in a single apartment was stark and lonely, however. Being dropped in amongst preexisting cliques in the middle of the Danish school year meant that I had little social ground to stand on–I found I gravitated towards students undergoing nontraditional education paths (including a Brazilian software engineer reentering into his degree after having dropped out years ago! neat guy). Study groups and my intuition for course structure were gone, too. Lectures were longer and gave fewer formulas; lab sections were more open-ended; homework was nonexistent. The passage of time in the semester had lost its meaning to me without therhythm of assignments–this was compounded by one of courses entire grade being determined by a final exam where I had to lecture over random course material. The one similarity, funnily enough, was that creating a formula sheet was still the best study tool.After lecture-based courses ended, I entered lab work at QDev–I had previously been burned out at home after doing nonstop research since high school graduation, so having the quarter of lab-vacation was exactly what I needed. Engaging in physics research gave me firsthand experience with Danish work culture, with its hour-long group lunches and leaving early on Fridays. The first exposure to the work-culture differences was my first day there, when the PI of the lab announced that he would be taking paternity leave for my entire visit. I was instead supervised by a postdoc and a lab consultant. Theres a phrase I coined during my time that summarizes it nicely: “I’ll step on your toes if you step on mine. ” Inconveniencing others to enjoy your time is simply less taboo. Someone not there for a meeting? Theres no rumors, no grumbling, and no shame. Hopefully, theyre enjoying the 20 hours of daily sunlight in Copenhagen. After several months of feeling isolated, I was definitely amenable to the more relaxed, social work environment. There were also some American students there from Purdue and the University of Washington, so it became easier to mingle. The lab was also my primary course of interaction with actual… Danes.I would be remiss to not talk about my experiences outside school as well. Most of my money during the semester went directly to bakeries. Bakeries are not only where you eat pastries (which are excellent btw) but also get coffee, meet with friends, and do work. Everyone has their favorite local bakery, and I spent many weekends at Andersen Bakery taking notes over my Modern Physics textbook for independent study. Copenhagen is generally a food city–partialy due to the influence of Noma–so I had plenty of opportunities to explore European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cuisine. I also got to learn what it means to smell like home after finding fresh corn tortillas at a food market, which nearly brought me to tears. I took the opportunity to try some beer and wine while I was in the city, but found it overrated. Danish alcohol consumption is the highest in Europe, especially among teenagers, and it felt frustrating that all student social gatherings seemingly required cheap alcohol to function. Eventually, I learned to find humor in the daydrinking grannies and similar occurrences, but my lack of interest hampered some opportunities to maintain connections to other students. International travel was also fairly easy, so I took advantage of various trains to see some cities in Sweden and even a weekend in Berlin. Sweden was nice, but Berlin was almost familiar to me due to its similarity to east-coast American cities. Very hip. I took the opportunity to reach one of my few goals for the study abroad period–I got to hear a good European orchestra via the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of two Mahler pieces. It was admittedly nice to be in an audience with some familiarity of how to act at a formal symphony concert–there is so much ritual motion inthat experience that gets lost at SoNA concerts, and the Berlin Phil’s playing was just… beyond comparison to other ensembles I’ve heard. That last little stretch to near-perfection was evident or It is very easy to romanticize many aspects of Nordic culture, but calling it “better worse” (aside from the healthcare) loses too much detail. I have always struggled with the idea of work-life balance, so the looser time commitments at school/work were uncomfortable for me. Copenhagen is a beautiful, eminently liveable city, but this is because the primary goal of Danish government for the last few centuries has literally been maintaining livability in Copenhagen–they even joined the Third Reich in WWII, essentially out of convenience, and became known as the whipped cream front” due to the high standards of living in their capitol city. I know now that I want to find a city to live in in the future; I also know better how not to live in one, from my awkward habitation of Copenhagen.