Mission & Vision
Our Mission
The THS International Reception’s goal is to make people feel a sense of belonging in their new environment. We support every new masters, exchange, PhD and international student at the start of their new, exciting stage of life at KTH.
For this, we organise a diverse collection of events in which everyone can participate, making lifelong friends along the way. Our incoming students are a very diverse group and we embrace this diversity in our events, having a wide variety of events to best fit everyone’s different interests. We provide all kinds of events such as board games nights, city tours, kayaking tours, dinners, parties and more!
Through this diverse collection of events, people meet individuals with similar interests or have the opportunity to try something new. Furthermore, they can meet people from around the world and share cultural experiences.
We aim to be able to provide these annual 2,500 new students the space to feel included and a sense of belonging in the KTH community, while showing them Swedish student life, KTH and life in Stockholm.
In other words, we will make sure that this is the best possible start for our new students.
Our Vision
Our vision for the future is that everyone is included in the KTH community.
The THS International Reception has grown enormously since its start in the mid 2000s. From a small operation with just ten events, we have grown into one of the largest projects on campus with 150+ events created by 250+ volunteers every year. This development became a stepping stone in becoming a more visible part of the THS community.
However, despite our success, we continue working towards our vision. Most parts of the THS community still operate mostly in Swedish, creating a language barrier to international students. With KTH becoming more and more international, we believe that these barriers need to be removed as much as possible.
Furthermore, a lot of the student life is centered around the Chapter (sektion in Swedish), which are organizations for people of a similar study field. While this is great for creating friendships amongst those groups of people, we think that there are many unexplored possibilities. We want to create a space where people of all study fields come together.
We believe that as part of the experience of being at KTH, all students should be able to have easy access to all student life areas. Chapters serve as an area where people can meet others of a similar study field, while associations and other organizations allow students to meet based on their interests.
In order to do so, we believe that the THS International Reception should be a platform for students to connect with all chapters, clubs, associations, and groups at THS. Our future vision is to coordinate a Reception, in which events are hosted by everyone, for everyone, meaning that Chapters, KTH/THS associations, and the THS International Reception work together to create events for everyone.
By offering this platform we move one step closer to the vision, decreasing language barriers and making the student life more open to everyone along the way. We want to create an environment where everyone feels welcomed, integrated, and included in the KTH community. We strongly believe that we can achieve this task, but only together.