How do trust, agency, connectedness, belonging, and anxiety manifest in the everyday lives of DIS students living in Copenhagen? The study uses Self-Determination Theory as its frame: three psychological needs that, when met, predict well-being.
At the same time, the political pressure on US campuses to eliminate DEI, gender studies, and sustainability programs puts pressure on DIS's business model and strengths. Yet the draw to Scandinavia has never been stronger for Americans who want authentic, immersive, educational experiences. DIS is well positioned, but only if it evolves its offer.
Sharing that mastery by matching student strengths and weaknesses amplifies the positive impact. DIS can design for that.
Students who mastered everyday tasks reported higher autonomy, and autonomy correlated directly with how widely they explored the city (r=0.50, p<0.10). Every DIS cohort contains students at different stages of city confidence. Connecting those who have mastered biking, transit, or grocery shopping with those who haven't yet creates a lateral, peer-to-peer dynamic that costs little and compounds across the cohort.
Copenhagen outperformed home universities on every well-being metric except one: participation in local groups. The student body rotates every semester; local organizations don't. Inviting recurring Danish organizations onto campus creates structured, repeated contact with locals — the one thing the data shows Copenhagen currently lacks for DIS students.
DIS's primary market faces structural pressure from demographic contraction and the defunding of liberal arts programs. DIS already has what most executive education providers lack: 65 years of Danish institutional relationships, a city-as-classroom model, and 5,000+ alumni who value the Copenhagen experience. Alumni formats are the lowest-risk entry point, since the infrastructure already runs.
The city already works. The question is how intentionally DIS works with it.
American college students studying at DIS use the city as a classroom. Copenhagen consistently ranks among the world's best for well-being. This study asks what impact living in Copenhagen has on student well-being.
Most national well-being surveys are "placeless." They do not account for the environments, streets, transit systems, and daily settings that young people actually inhabit. This study is place-based: it tracks where students go, what they feel when they get there, and what that means for their development over a semester.
The study uses Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000) as its primary lens. SDT proposes that human well-being depends on the ongoing satisfaction of three basic psychological needs:
Copenhagen's built environment creates structural conditions that support all three needs. The study's central hunch was that this environment, experienced directly rather than from a campus, would produce measurable well-being gains.
A mixed-methods CBPAR (Community-Based Participatory Action Research) pilot, running from February to April 2026. Students were recruited through guest lectures in 8 DIS courses and an open house, then participated across four complementary methods.
The app asked students to capture photos of moments that triggered a felt sense of belonging, connection, confidence, discomfort, or anxiety, then tag the emotion, record a brief reflection, and log their GPS location. The result was 244 geotagged emotional annotations distributed across Copenhagen and beyond, providing a spatial layer that surveys alone cannot produce.
Participants came from 8 urban and 10 non-urban home university environments across the US. Most lived in kollegiums on Amager and Indre By; a smaller group lived in homestays and LLCs further from the city center. In Survey 1, students rated "strong close relationships" and "contributing to community" as their top markers of a successful life, scoring them 4.95 and 4.68 out of 5 respectively. Income and property ownership scored below 3.7.
| Urban (n=8) | Non-urban (n=10) |
|---|---|
| Boston metro, MA (n=2) | Bloomington, IN |
| Burbank, CA | Blue Bell, PA |
| Minneapolis, MN | Elon, NC |
| Northampton, MA | Lawrence, KS (n=2) |
| St. Louis metro, MO (n=2) | Madison, WI |
| Tacoma, WA | Oberlin, OH |
| Washington, DC | Oyster River, NH |
| Roskilde (homestay) |
Five themes emerged consistently across methods: confidence, belonging, discomfort, anxiety, and connection. Positive experiences dominated in frequency and geographic range. Negative experiences clustered in predictable, addressable places.
Across interviews, the clearest pathway to belonging ran through competence: students who had mastered an everyday task described feeling like they belonged. Biking to class, navigating the metro, ordering in Danish at a café, showing a visiting family member around — these moments accumulated into a felt sense of being capable in Copenhagen.
Students who explored the city more widely also reported higher autonomy. The correlation between spatial spread of app photos and autonomy score was r=0.50 (p<0.10, n=12 students with both data types). This is a directional finding, consistent with SDT: wider exploration suggests higher felt autonomy.
In app annotations that mentioned biking (n=18), connection and belonging were the most frequently paired emotions (6 each), followed by confidence (5). Anxiety and discomfort appeared only twice each. No other activity showed a comparable positive emotional profile.
Students described biking as participation in Danish culture, not just transportation. One student tagged Gammeltorv: "Biking not only makes my morning commute fun and active, but it also allows me to experience something that is quintessential Copenhagen... it makes me feel part of something bigger, of the Danish way of life." The question for DIS is straightforward: what would it take to get more students biking within the first week?
Grocery stores appeared repeatedly across interviews and app annotations as sites of discomfort and anxiety, particularly early in the semester. Language barriers, unfamiliar payment systems, and the sense of being visibly foreign were consistently cited. One student's annotation: "Whenever I check out, the cashier always assumes I don't know Danish without even speaking to me, which makes me feel like I don't belong."
The same students described grocery shopping as a progress marker as the semester advanced. By April, navigating a supermarket confidently had become evidence of integration. Early anxiety around grocery shopping is not a problem to be eliminated. It is a developmental threshold to be supported through.
Spatial spread analysis found that confidence and belonging showed the highest geographic diversity, tagged across a wide range of neighborhoods and beyond. Anxiety showed the lowest spatial spread, concentrated in and around the city center where tourist density, pace, and unfamiliar social cues are highest. Students build their most meaningful experiences at the city's edges and in their own neighborhoods.
Copenhagen outperformed students' home universities on every well-being metric except one: participation in local groups. Connection with Danish locals was uneven, and where it did occur, it was almost always through a structured, recurring format: a host family, a kollegium with communal dinners, a choir, a Danish romantic partner. Casual encounters in cafés, on transit, and in shops did not produce felt connection for most participants.
App annotations from students' rooms and kollegiums revealed a strong desire to make spaces their own. Bare rooms were tagged as anxiety and discomfort; rooms filled with photos and shared objects were tagged as belonging and connection. "My apartment here is part of a kollegium which means since day one it's felt lived in and filled with things from past residents. That feeling has helped make the place feel more comfortable and homely." The accumulated presence of prior students was itself a source of belonging — evidence of shared experience across cohorts.
Between Survey 1 (March) and Survey 2 (April), three attitude measures shifted positively across the cohort. The largest gain was in students' belief that cities are fundamentally safe, rising nearly half a point on a 5-point scale. These are modest shifts across a small sample, but directionally consistent with SDT: as competence and relatedness grow, students' perception of cities in general changes, not just their view of Copenhagen.
To ground the aggregate findings in lived experience, two participants who completed all study components are presented here in abbreviated form. Their trajectories are different, and both are instructive.
AU1011 was the most locally embedded participant in the study, living on a commune in Roskilde, attending bi-weekly communal dinners, and navigating daily life in Danish from early in the semester.
Her WHO-5 well-being score (60) fell below the sample average (68), and her SDT competence score dropped from 5.0 in March to 4.3 in April. The study reads this not as failure but as evidence of genuine integration: her judgement of her own progress became more honest as she understood better how much she still had to learn. Students who start with a perfect competence score often recalibrate as they encounter the real complexity of living in a new culture.
Copenhagen and her home placement both scored 5/5 for well-being. DIS's social and academic environments scored 3/5. The city is working. DIS's own social infrastructure may not be serving students like AU1011 as well as it could.
SA0606 arrived anxious, having not had to make new friends in three years. She made a conscious decision to stay in Copenhagen on weekends when others travelled, and to sit with discomfort rather than avoid it. Her autonomy score rose from 3.6 in March to 4.0 in April.
She also had the highest belonging annotation rate in the cohort (42% of her photos) alongside the highest discomfort rate (32%). Co-occurring belonging and discomfort is the signature of productive integration. She was feeling more at home precisely because she was still being challenged.
Taken together, the two cases suggest that integration pathway matters less than integration depth. A student embedded in Danish family life and a student living alone in a kollegium can both thrive, when given the conditions to engage on their own terms.
This was a pilot. The findings are directional, not conclusive. What they most usefully do is generate a set of questions worth exploring further.
This research is the product of open and generous collaboration, feedback, and support from colleagues at DIS and beyond. Thank you all for shaping this work in your own unique and useful way.
Explore CPH, Spring 2026. DIS Learning Lab. Jeff Risom, Learning Lab Fellow. Madeline Pugh, Lead Student Researcher. Reed Dolan, Student Assistant. jeff@greenomstilling.com
Self-Determination Theory: Deci & Ryan (1985); Ryan & Deci (2000). WHO-5 Well-Being Index. Urban Belonging app: photovoice methodology. CBPAR framework.
1 The Urban Belonging app was developed in collaboration with DTU (Technical University of Denmark) and Gehl.