It has already been many months since I came back from Salzburg, but I didn’t have the time or inspiration to write about everything that happened during my studies abroad. After returning to KISK, I realized the differences I felt during my studies abroad and how it changed my perspective on what I study and do.
Traveling
When I moved to Salzburg, I left all my volunteering and work behind, which brought me quite a lot of free time, even when I was committing a lot of time to school as well.
I traveled to Switzerland and a little part of France (Pontarlier) by train, which was amazing. I visited the National Event of ESN Switzerland (ok, I volunteered a little by participating in this event). I bought the Klimaticket card for the whole of Austria, which cost 800 euros for students, but it paid off after 4 months and is valid till February 2025. Thanks to this card, I also went to Vienna a few times and fell in love with this city like never before.
The most beautiful part of living in Salzburg is its proximity to lakes and mountains. I loved discovering these beautiful parts of nature and walking around or swimming in those beautiful lakes.
SCHOOL
I really valued the opportunity to discover the teaching styles of different universities. As I already said in the last post, I attended a few classes for the Human-Computer Interaction master’s degree, which connects the University of Salzburg and the Technical University of Salzburg. One of the most inspiring subjects was Contextual Interaction Design and Contextual Analysis. We focused on creating a product that can help connect craft and emerging technology, in our case, crocheting. I’ve never had the opportunity to work on a design project for so long, so it brought me new experiences and showed me that I would love to design more. During our semester, we did semistructured interviews, hosted a co-designing workshop, created functional prototypes, and many more. It was also really fascinating to understand that this master’s degree is really a full-time commitment. My classmates had classes every day, worked on several group projects and personal projects, and it was for sure more demanding than here in the Czech Republic.
I mentioned other classes in the previous post, and I will elaborate on data ethics and identity class. This class focused on similar topic: ethics in Ai as my other class Moral Machines, it was fascinating to see how different target group can change the discussion about this topic. Moral Machines as a class for philosophy students were way more theoretical and focused on the topic, mostly hypothetical. We discussed the limits of AI ethics, but it didn’t really lead to any resolutions. On the other hand, Data Ethics and Identity were focused on IT and HCI students, which led to more practical discussions and policies and a direct influence on their jobs. I found the second class more important to me, and I decided to drop the Moral Machines class. It was a hard decision to do so, but it didn’t serve me as I wanted.
If I had to choose 3 takeaways from my semester abroad after 6 months of being back, it would be these:
- Exchange is always a good time for changes; it helped me to step away from things that no longer served me, and I had the opportunity to reshape my approach for future opportunities.
- Going away from people and work gave me more time to focus on resting, studying, and sports, but it also means that part of your sense of purpose created by volunteering, community, and work is lost, and sometimes it hurts.
- Studying is fun! Learning from new perspectives and learning new topics that are not that common at KISK opens new ideas and inspiration. (side note: also, learning German 4 times a week in a German-speaking country is way more fun than learning just once per week in the Czech Republic.)
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