My main question was if the amount of students going abroad was increasing and if this possible trend would continue. I didn't have data to support that this would be a trend when I started but my gut feeling told me so.
The first thing I did was ask for statistics about the total amount of students and the amount of international students, both from my home university the Mid Sweden University (Miun) and Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Hva).
It was a struggle getting to the right apartment of Hva as everything was in Dutch – They might wanna work on that. - but when I got the statistics they showed a clear increase in the amount of exchange students as well as the percentage year by year since 2010.
The statistics from Miun were harder to draw conclusions about, the amount varied year by year and Miun has made many changes lately, like moving a school from a city to another, so I found that the statistics were a bit too unreliable to base anything on. To get facts from different directions I also did interviews with Miuns international co-ordinator and many exchange students at both Hva and Miun. I asked him if he had seen any difference in the interest for studying abroad among the students at Miun from the media department over the years. I avoided words like increase and decrease to keep it neutral.
He told me that he had seen a clear increase in the interest in the amount of students going abroad, I asked more questions than that in case I would pick anything useful up but that question answered what I wanted to know.
The next step was to interview students, in the end I did 20 interviews. The question I asked was what they thought about their decision to go abroad, avoiding positive and negative words. Of course there also had to be some "why" and "how" from my side but that was the main question.
Out of the twenty students I interviewed only one mentioned anything bad about going abroad, and that was the weather in Amsterdam and probably meant as a joke. Many said that it was great not only because of the studies but also because of the valuable lessons they learned about life. My conclusion or theory is that when all of these students return back home they will most likely be spreading the message that going abroad is a good idea, which will encourage more students to go abroad and so on.
Despite that I didn't get any definite facts about my main question from these interviews they gave me a good insight into the mind of an exchange student. Having been one myself five years ago (and now) I also really understand what they mean by life lessons. I had only been away from my parents for two weeks before my half year in Germany and man did I grow up in many ways.
So from my research I learned that the amount increases at Hva, that the Miun co-ordinator sees an increase and that the students going abroad are glad they did, which makes me predict an increase, three things from different methods that all say the same thing. And that was it, hopefully my teacher thinks it's alright.
The picture is of course the poster. As my computer apparently decides it can't download that pdf but any other pdf works fine the picture is taken of my screen with a phone. Sorry about that but at least you get to see how it looks.