Hi,
I would like to describe what courses I had at SRUC. First of all, my courses here were quite different from what I study at SLU because business courses here were similar to the ones that I had already taken and there could be problems with overlapping courses eventually. But I think it was great to see something different and it gave me other perspectives and overall overview of how the environment works.
One of my courses was called Ecology: Management and Impact which was the course I lacked basic knowledge in ecology in, but I learned many interesting things how species live in the environment, what the interactions are between species, how they are affected by habitat change and land use change. These are probably the things that I would never find out by myself, however, I am happy to have this knowledge as it gave me completely new insights into the environment and its interactions with other living organisms, how biodiversity is vulnerable and ecosystem services essential.
We had to write a literature review on a chosen topic from the list. I wrote the literature review on “The restoration of species-rich vegetation” which was something I had hardly any knowledge but in the course of reading the literature and articles, I got fascinated by many different approaches to increase species richness. The review had to be 2500 words long and was done individually. In the second half of the course, we had to present our topic to the class, which was also graded. This together comprised 50% of the final grade and the rest depends on the final exam.
Exams at SRUC followed the same pattern. We were given 4 topics/questions and had to choose 2 out of them and write an essay. We had one hour and a half or two hours to finish both questions. I liked this system where you can choose the questions because you always have some areas with deeper knowledge hence you can show your knowledge better. Similarly as in Sweden, all our belongings had to be at the back of the room. We will receive the results at the end of January which is a really long time but hopefully everything is fine.
I think it is great that during Erasmus we can broaden our knowledge in the areas that we usually do not have an opportunity to get deeper into. Therefore this course was valuable for me.
Bye, Denisa