Day 4: Let’s do what we came here to do

Today was our first visit day to the businesses and we started off with a great one! This morning we went to Skapa Digital Design and met with the CEO, Erik Ekholm. Skapa was founded in 1996 by Erik and his wife and currently has 9 employees. Fun fact, Erik is also an online lecturer for Carthage College! During our visit, Erik told us all about the way Skapa functions, and gave us insight on “Smart Online Communication”.

Skapa has 2 main parts of its business: communication and marketing and web, technology, and development. Erik did a great presentation and gave us information on the business to business side instead of the business to consumer side that we always learn about. Erik pointed out that some challenges of online marketing include identifying potential customers and building trust and confidence. Another interesting fact that I learned from Erik was that in Europe, a lot of companies use Facebook for business, unlike the U.S. where we focus on using LinkedIn for business. The final thing he showed us was a couple examples of ads that companies have done. My favorite was the Hate + Hope = Back to Africa Video. The ad was made by a travel company and used negative tweets about Africa and turned them into positive videos.

In the afternoon we went to Gothenburg University to experience a little bit about being a student at the university. The University was founded in 1891 but was made public in 1954. The University currently prides itself as being one of the top 4 universities in Sweden. 95% of the students in Sweden go to high school, and 50% of students go to universities. We also learned that the university functions on the “bologna” model. This means that students in the bachelor program go for 3 years, masters degree for 2 years, and PhD for 4 years. The professors also informed us that the business school is triple crown accredited (meaning they are very high up in business schools).

My favorite part of the day was Ask A Swede. During this time current Swedish students came in and we were able to ask them any question and they asked us a bunch of questions. Our table met with Eric, who wasn’t originally from Sweden, but he lived with an Asian family growing up. I think he told our group at least 20 times how his favorite thing from America was funnel cakes. Anytime we brought up anything related to America he wanted to know everything about funnel cakes. The first question we asked him was about American stereotypes. It surprised us, but he was a very big American fan. To our surprise, he told us that Americans are actually very hard to pick out when they are walking down the street (they may be able to pick us out because there’s 21 of us but small details). Another thing that was very surprising to a lot of our group was that ranch is not a big thing over here. Eric told us that it takes away from the flavor of the actual food. Matt asked him about the King Sandwich that we are all trying and we found out that the shrimp is cold so we are all interested to see how it tastes. I think the most interesting thing we learned was that Swedes can retake tests as many times as they need to.

Tonight we went out for dinner in smaller groups. We went to Julia’s Café for dinner, as American as that sounds, it was actually an Italian restaurant. As we have at almost all of the other bars and restaurants we’ve been to, we all got the pear ciders. I tried spinach tortellini and it was very good. The meal of the day was Robby’s lamb, which apparently was really good. After that we returned to the hostal and worked on our blog for a little bit. We ended the night at our favorite bar, Karlson’s Garage, for a late night drink. I finally got Kendall to try IPA’s so I would call the day a success.

Things I’ve learned:

1. Gothenburg and Sweden in general are very big export industries, with around 90% of their products being exported.

2. The Skapa CEO told us that we are too old for TikTok, clearly he hasn’t used it enough to know how fun it is.

3. The city is relatively easy to navigate because it operates on a grid system, very similar to Chicago.