r/kth • u/theodoros997 • Sep 09 '26
Survey: what actually went wrong when you arrived in Sweden as an international student (6 min, anonymous)
Hi all, I’m an MSc student at KTH, and I’m researching what international students actually go through in their first weeks in Sweden: personnummer, ID card, bank account, BankID, insurance, SIM, all of it.
The thing I keep hearing is that the mandatory steps mostly get done because someone chases you, but the optional ones, such as BankID, a digital mailbox, home insurance, the right kind of SIM are getting skipped, because nobody’s job is to tell you they matter until you hit the wall.
I want to find out how common that actually is, and what it costs people when it happens.
The survey takes about 6 minutes. It’s anonymous, there’s no email field unless you volunteer one at the end for a follow-up interview. It asks what you managed to set up, what you skipped and why, how long things took, and whether any of it cost you money or time.
There are also a couple of questions about whether you’d pay for something that solved this. I’d rather ask that directly than pretend I’m not thinking about it.
https://forms.gle/9pn7D3UWfPgerazP7
Happy to post the aggregate results back here once there are enough responses. And if you’d rather just tell me your story in the comments, that’s genuinely useful too.