Looking out at the grounds of the Stockholm Palace

Author: Rylee Myers | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Summer 2025

I studied abroad in Sweden with the Health Teams Abroad program, a university-led program with a group of twenty fellow students and two professors. The goal of the program was to compare American and Swedish healthcare systems and bring what we learned to our future healthcare careers. We spent two weeks in Jönköping, Sweden, visiting healthcare facilities and listening to lectures from various fields, and then spent one week in Stockholm. I actually first heard about the program on my very first day at college — a senior who had gone on the program that summer spoke to me at length about how it transformed the way he saw medicine. From that moment, I knew it was a program I wanted to apply to.

During our two weeks in Jönköping, we visited Jönköping University and heard from professionals about different aspects of Swedish healthcare. We also had frequent site visits to a wide range of healthcare facilities. I am particularly interested in physical medicine and rehabilitation, so I was especially drawn to our visits to rehabilitation centers. Sweden is known for its interdisciplinary nature of its healthcare system and how well its infrastructure supports that collaboration. A patient recovering from a massive accident, for example, can typically access most or all of their necessary care centered in one facility. Their diverse care team — physicians, therapists, nurses, social workers — work closely together to deliver the best care possible. This allows the patient to focus on healing rather than navigating a fragmented and confusing system.

This is a stark contrast compared to the United States, where care is often disjointed across multiple providers, and the burden of navigating insurance and referrals can fall heavily on the patients. It was frustrating to realize just how much someone’s recovery can be influenced by systems far beyond their control. This experience made me passionate about fostering interdisciplinary collaboration wherever possible in my future career.

Of course, this study abroad program was full of transformative moments outside of the classroom as well. One of my favorite memories happened completely by chance: we just happened to be in Stockholm during the Ice Hockey World Championships, and the U.S. was playing in the gold medal match for the first time in 90 years. Once we found out, we immediately bought tickets. The night was unforgettable – the pregame excitement, cheering when we saw the few other fellow Americans there, buying USA hockey hats, gorging on hot dogs, and the pure exhilaration of our team knocking in the winning goal in overtime. We spent the whole train ride back grinning and laughing, which earned us many dirty looks from Swiss fans, the runner-up team, but we didn’t care. The magical win lining up perfectly for us to be there made the entire program feel fated — like I was meant to be there with those people.

Another favorite memory was hiking Hassafall, a wooded path outside of Jönköping that climbs steadily until you can see the city standing beside the glittering Lake Vättern. We ate dinner next to a small waterfall with the family of one of our guides, roasting hot dogs and trying out Swedish snacks and candy. When we reached the top — panting and a little sweaty — and took in the view, it finally felt real that we had travelled thousands of miles to be there. In that moment, I realized how deeply this shared experience studying abroad would bond us, how a piece of us would always stay in that place. We took many group pictures at the top, and I remember wishing I could tuck the moment in my pocket and relive it again and again. It was the turning point when twenty students who boarded a plane together became a group of friends exploring and learning from a new country.

While the personal memories of exploring a new country will always stick with me, the academic experience reshaped the way I think about medicine and my future role within it. One of the most valuable lessons I learned in Sweden was the importance of understanding the systematic factors that affect patient’s well-being. As a student, it is easy to get caught up in memorizing facts or processes, but it is equally important to critically understand the system in which we will one day work. My time in Sweden showed me that becoming a physician isn’t just about treating individual patients, one by one, for the rest of my life. It’s about accepting the responsibility of staying aware of the ways in which my community struggles and how that affects patients. It means learning more about the resources available to them outside of medicine. It means acknowledging that our system is far from perfect — while still doing everything I can to help the people within it.