Studera.nu – New ‘Operational Status’ Blog – Updated 23rd Oct.

Studera.nu now has a blog with updates about the status of studera.nu. It’s a mixture of Swedish and English but does contain contact information for studera.nu staff.

I only took a quick look, but I did not see a link from studera.nu to their blog, which seems a bit odd.

Tip of the hat to the ever awesome studera.nu facebook group for this.

I notice that they don’t allow comments on their blog (which misses the point of having a blog, I think) so if there is anything you want to add about their posts, feel free to leave it here.

Finally, with my SEO hat on, it seems they have a bit of a problem with the page rank of both this blog and studera.nu, which seems odd given that every university in Sweden links to them.

Updated: I recently had a great conversation with VHS/studera.nu who explained that they do not, currently, have the resources to deal with the volume of questions they receive from the their blog site, nor can they enable comments at this time.  The blog is only there to report on the status of their website, studera.nu. As a result, I’ve taken down the link to their contact site as they cannot guarantee a response to questions about applications and admission procedure. For the time being, use the contact information available at studera.nu.

Studera.nu Online Application Website Crashes – Again. Much discussion on Twitter.

Students making last minute applications to Swedish universities would have had problems, and a ton of stress, last night when the studera.nu crashed for a few hours in the late evening. This was reported in more detail, and in Swedish, at the Aftonbladet site.  As Aftonbladet reports, and as I know from my own experience, this is at least the third time this has happened during an application period.

First, this is just unacceptable for such an important service particularly one which, if I\’m correct, the universities themselves pay for.

The Twittersphere not unsurprisingly carried a lot of discussion about this, check out Twingly or Twitter Search to see. Most of the tweets are in Swedish but some are in English.

Studera.nu update

I’ll be offline for the next week, so I’ve switched off comments, I’ll do my best to answer them when I return.

For those of you who are waiting for acceptance results for studera.nu, I spoke with them and the previous error messages that some of you were receiving has been fixed. See my earlier blog post about this

Studera.nu: error messages “Requirements not fulfilled, unqualified and specific requirements not fulfilled”

Update: 4th April. I spoke to studera.nu and it looks like this problem is fixed now.

The studera.nu website now has the following information: (it’s in the column on the right hand side of the page)

“NEWS: Due to a technical malfunction on Your pages, applicants get the wrong information about their eligibility status for master’s studies right now. As this glitch will be fixed by 12 March, we kindly  ask you to disregard the following notes for the time being: ‘Requirements not fulfilled’, ‘Unqualified’, ‘Specific requirements not fulfilled’.”

I’ve had some comments about this here, and have seen that students are concerned by this (and quite rightly so) on the studera.nu facebook group – hopefully this will answer some concerns. I can’t imagine that things are going to be any calmer on the 13th March, however.

Studera.nu wiki

A wiki describing studera.nu, and how to apply to a master’s programme in Sweden has been launched by Andrei Neculau. This is the evolution of his blog, which he created in response to the difficulties he had with studera when he applied. The usual disclaimers apply, this is not an official wiki from studera, but it’s packed with information and should help with the application, and post application, processes (which Andrei calls ‘war’ and ‘purgatory’).

Apart from the fact that this is incredibly useful for people making applications to study in Sweden it’s also a great example of the future of the web (dare I say it, ‘web 2.0′). As it’s a wiki, it’s totally interactive and, crucially, not ‘owned’ by studera. Maybe in the future we’ll start seeing students creating their own university websites which become as useful, if not more so, than the university’s own website?