Aristea Kyriakou from Greece moved to Sweden to take the master’s programme in Outdoor Environmental Education and Outdoor Life, an earlier version of Outdoor and Sustainability Education.*

Aristea Kyriakou

“There couldn’t have been a better choice. This was one of the best years of my life! We built a great team of people and I’m still in contact with my friends from Linköping.”

She is very happy with her to decision to take the highly praised programme in Linköping. “It’s one of the leading programmes in Europe in outdoor education. Sweden is a pioneer in this field and the topic is, by its very nature, Swedish.”

Aristea particularly liked the interplay between experience and reflection, the connection between theory and practice. “We did so much: we were outdoors a lot, applied the knowledge we had gained from books, built igloos, went cross-country skiing and sledging.”

Sweden and Linköping exceeded her expectations. “Sweden is a really welcoming country. It embraces everyone and has a really caring system. And the extremely eco-friendly campus, the bicycles and the closeness to nature were really nice. What you study gets applied here every day.”

After a second master’s in Social Research with a specialisation in outdoor education she is now working for her PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Her research focuses on the use of school playgrounds in outdoor education. Aristea is grateful to all her teachers and classmates who made her time at LiU meaningful and fun. And to all prospective master’s students she just wants to say: 

“If you want to live and experience outdoor education and not just write a piece that sits on the shelf, you should go for this master’s in Linköping.”