🇸🇪 Uppsala

In Sweden the personnummer, the personal identity number, is the key to almost everything: a bank account, a phone contract, insurance, registering at a vårdcentral, even some online purchases. If your stay is shorter than a year, which it is for many researchers and exchange students, you do not get one.

You can live without it, and every simple task takes twice the energy and always needs explaining. That administrative erosion happens in your first months, exactly when you most need something stable.

And it is the same number that the health system asks for at the door. Which means somebody who has just arrived and is not doing well is frequently the same person facing the hardest route to getting help.

Academic work has no clear boundary. The experiment runs into the evening, the paper gets written at the weekend, and there is always somebody working more. For an Iranian researcher who came on a scholarship or whose family paid for it, that pressure carries an extra layer: you have to prove it was worth it.

Uppsala is a small city and in winter it is dark and quiet. If your lab is your only social setting, which it is for a lot of people, then one disagreement with a supervisor or one failed project takes your whole world with it.

The public route is the usual one: the vårdcentral, 1177, an assessment, and a queue. The university also has student counselling, which is free with a limited number of sessions, usually in Swedish or English.

None of it is in Farsi. And for somebody who has spent three years thinking most of the day in a second language, discussing the hard things in a third is a barrier in itself.