Learning from professionals: Machine Learning and App Development at DIS Stockholm 

Computer science is one of the fastest growing job sectors in the world and one of the most popular undergraduate majors in America, with more and more students graduating from computer science programs every year. As you complete your CS studies, how can you make sure that you stand out from the rest? 

DIS Stockholm students Diya (College of Wooster) and Marco (Bowdoin College) both chose to spend a semester abroad during the fall of 2023, studying computer science in a new cultural and professional context.  

In their Machine Learning and App Development courses, they studied with teachers who are also working professionals in the fields they want to break into. Their faculty work in roles ranging from software consultant to app developer at a startup to software engineer at one of Sweden’s largest unicorns, Spotify. 

Read Diya and Marco’s reflections below on how they came away from their semester with new skills in computer science and new professional insights into their career goals. 

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Why study machine learning abroad?  

You can study computer science just about anywhere you can take a computer. So, what drew Diya and Marco to spend their semester studying in Stockholm?  

Both said that they wanted a new, fresh perspective on their major and that studying abroad was an important part of their undergraduate goals, but most important for each of them was the opportunity to earn credits toward their major during their semester abroad.  

As he researched abroad programs, Marco said he was thinking “I need to graduate and I also need to finish my major, so what programs have classes that I can take and will transfer to my home school so that I’ll get credit?”  

For Diya, the timing aspect of a semester abroad during the fall semester was also key.  

“My home university only offers certain courses during certain terms and there just aren’t that many study abroad programs offering these kinds of courses,” Diya said, “So, especially when you don’t have that many semesters left at the end of the day, and this course is offered at DIS every semester, it’s kind of an easy choice. It made more sense for me to take Machine Learning here, keep my knowledge fresh, and once I get back to campus, I have more time to just focus on finishing the rest of my requirements and getting through college with less stress.”

Both said that DIS Stockholm was one of the few programs that offered a chance to study machine learning abroad. Diya had already completed a summer internship involving machine learning and wanted to keep her knowledge fresh and better understand the fundamentals underlying the work she did, and Marco was new to the subject, but knew that it was an incredibly hot topic in the world of computer science.  

“It’s been really eye opening to learn how much is happening here in Sweden and how applicable the topic is to our day-to-day lives,” Marco said. “We can leverage machine learning to find interesting creative solutions to all sorts of problems.” 

Faculty bring their work experience to class 

Stockholm is home to a buzzing tech scene, with firms ranging from the world-renowned giants of Spotify and Klarna to small college-projects-turned-startups. That means that Stockholm attracts some of the most talented developers and programmers in the world to work and live there. 

“My Machine Learning professor is working at a software consulting firm and works with machine learning all the time. Then in my App Development class we have two teachers, one works at Spotify as a software engineer and the other one is also an app developer at a startup,” Marco said. “So my teachers have real world experience doing what they are teach us. That’s been a fantastic bonus for me.” 

Faculty at DIS like to teach what they do, meaning they teach from their professional perspectives and bring that experience into the classroom. For Marco and Diya, this means their teachers provided context around how classroom topics applied to their jobs. Class projects and assignments could be informed by real scenarios they have experienced in the workplace.  

“That made the assignments way more intriguing for me,” Diya said. Instead of just learning the textbook mathematics that go into an algorithm, her professors were able to explain how they took some of the exact same methods she was learning in the classroom and used them in their professional contexts.  

“I think their perspective on things is a lot fresher and more applicable because the real world is not all perfect theory,” Marco said.

His teachers explained how, outside of the classroom, you won’t always be working with the sort of perfect data sets you might normally be provided in an undergraduate course. “You’re going to work with code where you don’t perfectly understand what somebody else coded before you, or the dataset isn’t quite what you expected,” Marco said. “How do you work around the bumps you’re going to find along the road? The real world is imperfect, and one thing my professors do very well is teach you how to deal with those imperfections.” 

Along with their professional experience, faculty at DIS Stockholm bring a relaxed, Scandinavian approach to their teaching. You can expect to call your faculty by their first name, without the formality of titles, and get to know them on a personal level. And when they are teaching, the classroom remains an open ground for conversation and discussion. 

“When our teacher goes over something that’s a little complex, he’ll pause and ask us if there are any questions. And from there we can really have a conversation about it altogether, rather than having any kind of having a wall in between the professor and the class,” Marco said. “I really appreciate that conversational nature in the classroom, which is something that I’ve experienced in all my DIS classes.” 

Seeing how people work, where they work 

Wednesdays at DIS are reserved for Field Studies. These are special opportunities for your class to go out into Stockholm and learn in new contexts. For many computer science courses, these involve visits to local companies, large and small, to see how professionals are applying classroom principles in real world situations.  

“Field Studies are actually my favorite part about classes here,” Diya said. “You go out and get a practical, career-focused outlook and you see how all of this is really applied.” 

Diya said her favorite Field Study of all was to Spotify, the iconic Stockholm-based music streaming company. At Stockholm, Diya was able to speak with software engineers about how Spotify uses machine learning to suggest new music based on a user’s listening tastes and with app developers about the challenges of creating and maintaining an app that is used across the globe.  

Especially as a junior who is beginning to seriously consider what her life will look like after graduation, Diya said the chance to see inside different workplaces and talk to people working in different roles has helped her to better understand what she is looking for career wise.  

I’ve never had something like this before, the opportunity to go into an office and see how people work, where they work, and talk to them about their jobs,” Diya said. “It’s so practical and you get to see what you’re learning in class being applied in a work environment, so that makes the classes feel even more impactful. I’ve just been loving my Field Studies.” 

All courses go on Field Studies, but your Core Course will also include two Study Tours, where you travel outside of Stockholm with your faculty and classmates to other European cities (Read more about Study Tours, Field Studies, and DIS academics here). On these tours, you will visit businesses, research institutions, museums, multisensory exhibits, and more to expand your studies into new contexts.  

On their short Study Tour to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, Marco and Diya’s Machine Learning course visited research labs to see how machine learning is applied in fields like robotics, data analytics, and self-driving cars. 

Along the way, their class also had meals and social activities like mini-golf and team building exercises to get to know one another and their teachers better. “What’s amazing is, I don’t think I’ve ever had a nice computer science professor like this before,” Diya said. “I’ve had great professors, but I haven’t learned from somebody who approached teaching and his students with such kindness and care for our learning.” 

Marco agreed, saying the time spent with his faculty outside the classroom helped him learn even more from them.  

“If you want to learn from people within the field, people who actually care about your growth not only as a student, but also a person, then you should go to DIS Stockholm” – Marco  

Want to learn more about Computer Science at DIS?

>> Read about the Computer Science program at DIS Stockholm
>> Read about the Machine Learning Core Course we offer
>> View all our Computer Science semester course offerings