Andrei Neculau

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Preparation

First you should decide what you want to do, look at what programmes are available, under which departments, and with what specializations. And you can only do that by finding out which are the biggest universities or which cities are academic focused. You can do that here.

There’s another easy way. Sydsvenska Industri- och Handels Kammaren (The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Southern Sweden) has a ranking list of Swedish universities. It is not an entirely academic focused ranking, but it offers a good start in my honest opinion. 2007 ranking list is available as PDF here.

Concerning Engineering the most important centers are to be found at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (The Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm and Chalmers Tekniska Högskola (Chalmers Institute of Technology) in Göteborg (Gothenburg). Then you have the universities in Uppsala, Linköping, Göteborg, Jönköping and others.

You could also take a look at the European universities’ ranking list for Sweden.

Another useful list that you need to look at is concerning the available Swedish Institute scholarships. You can do so here.

If you don’t fit into any of the region-specific or bilateral scholarships, then the only one that you might be able to apply for is the Guest Scholarship (description). Not all masters programmes are eligible for one, so make sure you check it out. The list is updated annually, and can provide you with some sort of hierarchy when you will have to choose which programmes to apply for. All SI Scholarships are around 8000 SEK.

Studera.nu provides a search engine for masters programmes, though I found it to be inefficient. You may want to try the one here, though I would say the best way is to just Google for the universities’ websites that you know of and look into their available masters programmes. Take notes for each of them that sound interesting! Remember to always check the requirements concerning ECTS credits. For some programmes you may not have enough ECTS credits in the required domain, or even worse you are required to have graduated specific courses!

At the moment when this articles was written, there were no fees implemented for any type of Higher Education in Sweden, although there seems to be an ongoing push into that direction.

Summarize your goals

After you have this preliminary list, I would recommend building an Excel list. Just put in every university you’ve found to have a programme in your area of interest, and the title of each programme.

You can/should then build a table with

1. each university’s ranking from the Chambers of Commerce (scale 0-150)
2. each university’s ranking from your personal perspective (scale 0-10)¹
3. each programme’s ranking from your personal perspective (scale 0-10)²
4. each programme’s eligibility for a scholarship (0 or 1)
5. each university’s extra points (0, 0.25 or 0.5)³

You then set a weight formula for each of them, and you end up with a score and a personalized ranking. This should give you a very good start to what you apply for.

You can always check out the statistics information that include number of available places, filled in places and the dynamics of the selection rounds. All that is available on the VHS Statistik page. Of course, it’s all in Swedish, but you can easily find your way around.
VT refers to Spring term, while HT refers to Fall term.
programutbildningar refers to programmes, while kurser refers to courses.
urval refers to selection round.

I have taken the time to translate a bit the statistics for HT2007 (Fall term 2007) and VT2008 (Spring term 2008). You have good chances of finding some of the programme alternatives you have chosen.
You can download it in English by clicking on VHS Statistics ⁴.

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