About Jeremy

My name is Jeremy Schooler and I am a junior at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. During the spring 2020 semester, I will be enjoying the new experiences of a semester abroad as I embark on the DIS: Copenhagen program. My blog is called Happy Valley to Scandinavia, as an ode to Penn State, which has developed the affectionate moniker of Happy Valley.

A little bit about me: I am 21 years old, I study broadcast journalism and history at Penn State, and my core course on the DIS program will be New Media and Changing Communities. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington D.C., and I have four older siblings.

This will not be my first time studying abroad; after I graduated from high school, I participated in a gap year program in Israel. As part of the program I (along with 50 others on my section of the program) spent four months living in Jerusalem, where I took classes for college credit. After winter break, we moved to a sea suburb of Tel Aviv, called Bat Yam (switching places with the 50 people on the other section of the program, who moved to Jerusalem from Bat Yam). In Bat Yam, we spent four months volunteering. Volunteering options were very wide ranging, and one of the options was to volunteer as an EMT, which I decided to do, despite no medical experience whatsoever. I spent a week in an EMT education program, taking ten hours of class a day, and by the end I was a certified EMT in Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross. I spent the next 10 weeks volunteering on ambulances. I can confidently say that this entire year, from the volunteering to traveling and exploring new places to simply living abroad, was the best of my life. It made me love traveling, and since then, I have made an effort to travel as much as possible.

My whole gap year was such an incredible experience, that I knew I had to study abroad again. I chose Copenhagen because I have long had an interest in Scandinavian culture, and have heard nothing but positive reviews of studying abroad there. Stay tuned as I blog about my experience throughout the next four months!