The campus of Reykjavik University looks like it was designed by someone who’d seen every other university campus in Europe and decided to do the opposite.
Which, in a sense, it was.
Reykjavik University sits on the south side of the Reykjavík peninsula, next to the sea, next to a geothermal beach, in a 90,000 square metre complex designed by Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects and local studio Arkís.
The university calls it a “UniverCity.” We’d normally mock that kind of branding, but standing in it, the concept makes more sense than it has any right to.
It doesn’t feel like a campus – it feels like a spaceship.
We’re here on the last stop of Day One of the Wonkhe SUs study tour to Iceland, and we’re meeting SFHR – Stúdentafélag Háskólans í Reykjavík – the student association, whose office is on the second floor of a building called Mars.
All enrolled students are automatic members with no fee. A seven-member executive board is elected each spring, and beneath it sit seven departmental student unions covering everything from sport science to computer science, each with their own elected board.
The chairs of those departmental unions form a representative council – the Fulltrúaráð – which connects the faculties to the central leadership.
The clever bit is what runs alongside it – a separate advocacy council, the Hagsmunaráð, which brings together the welfare and rights officers from each departmental union to coordinate on everything from teaching quality to accessibility to the national student loan fund.
The 12+3 system
For students, each semester splits into two distinct parts. First, a 12-week lecture term – typically four to six taught courses of varying sizes, plus a one-ECTS personal development unit. Then exams. Then (and only then) a three-week intensive block in which a single course is delivered entirely through project work, group collaboration, and company engagement.
That sequencing matters. Students enter the block course having already sat their exams for the semester’s taught content, so the intensive period isn’t competing with revision or assessment anxiety. It’s structurally post-assessment – a clean separation that gives the block space to be genuinely different.
Sixty to eighty industry guest lecturers participate annually in these blocks. It’s not a placement. It’s not a guest lecture dropped into an otherwise normal module. It’s a structurally separate three-week period where the entire cohort works on real problems with real companies, and the normal rhythm of lectures and seminars is suspended.
For many courses, years one and two are taught in Icelandic. Year three switches to English. In a country of 395,000 people, this is a pragmatic acknowledgement that graduates will need to work internationally – and that the academic literature in most fields isn’t in Icelandic.
It also means that by the time students hit the industry-facing block courses in their final year, they’re operating in the language their employers will use. The transition is built into the degree structure rather than left to chance.
Six modules, one ECTS each
There are also personal development courses built into the structure of the degree. Six of them, one ECTS each, spread across the degree – university life, wellbeing, leadership, critical thinking, public speaking, and career development. All pass–fail, all delivered centrally by professional services staff rather than subject academics.
They sit alongside the main subject courses every semester (one ECTS out of 31) and they’re compulsory.
This is a fascinating way to embed employability and skills in a degree. Each course is tiny – one ECTS is roughly ten hours of student effort. Pass–fail means no marking burden. Central delivery by professional services means no academic staff time. And because they’re spread across the whole degree rather than front-loaded into a “transitions” module in semester one, they maintain a steady presence without ever dominating a semester’s workload.
Many UK programmes attempt something similar by embedding employability content within discipline modules, which is invariably more expensive and less consistent. RU just made it a separate strand and got on with it.
Internships as simulated recruitment
In the final year of the BSc, students can apply for a 6 ECTS internship – but the process is designed to simulate an actual job search. Students submit a CV and cover letter, and companies select candidates for interviews. The placement itself is about solving real-world problems in a professional setting, but the route into it is doing much of the employability work before the internship even starts.
In most UK programmes, internship allocation is handled by a placements office or by students applying independently with whatever support they can find. Here, the simulation of recruitment is the point – the process is the pedagogy.
In the sixth semester, all students complete an extensive final project working in groups to take a project from concept to final product. Topics can be tailored to individual programmes or run as interdisciplinary projects across departments, and the course requires concentrated individual supervision.
So the degree’s cost profile is less expansive for most of its duration – lectures, small personal development units, pass–fail assessment – with cost concentrated in the three-week blocks (industry coordination), the internship simulation, and the final project (group work plus individual supervision).
Taken together, this feels like a smart and efficient way to do employability. Academics run academic modules, but there’s credit within the degree doing skills and employability work. It very much beats sending a PDF to academics and asking them to “insert” skills into the curriculum.
Free legal advice and a peer-reviewed journal
The departmental unions are where much of the innovation sits. Where we’d elect hundreds of course reps, here that kind of engagement starts inside their departmental unions. But these are much much more than academic societies.
The law students’ union at RU runs a free legal advice service staffed by senior students – a pro bono clinic, essentially – and publishes a peer-reviewed academic journal. Those are two things that in a UK context would be professionally staffed, externally funded, or both. Here they’re run by a student society with an elected committee.
The other departmental unions organise welcome, buddying, have a rights and welfare officer each, their own annual festivals, ski trips and international travel, and vísindaferðir – Friday afternoon industry visits that give students here the edge in graduate employability. They book a 2 hour after work visit to a company in the capital and students get to mix with potential future employers informally. They’re always over-subscribed – and they’re all organised and run by students.
Basically, they run that one simple trick that seems to remain so elusive in the UK.
The central association then runs a thicket of committees and sub-organisations that between them cover more ground than most UK SUs manage with ten times the staff. Sproti, the innovation committee, manages Seres – the university’s actual innovation and entrepreneurship centre – handling student applications for workspace and co-hosting the annual Gulleggið vísindaferð with KLAK.
Birta is the sustainability committee, which organises clothing swaps and book exchanges but also runs mental health awareness sessions and an annual charity week with fundraising challenges. Lukka plans the informal social programme – poker nights, speed-dating evenings, cocktail nights – designed to get people mixing across departments who otherwise wouldn’t meet.
And the international committee, chaired by the vice-president, supports exchange and international students and liaises with the university’s international office – a function that’s about to matter a lot more as Erasmus kicks back in.
Two things that don’t fit neatly into the committee structure but say something about the association’s ambitions.
First, SFHR runs an anonymous feedback portal where students can submit complaints or suggestions about teaching, assessments, or facilities. Complaints about teaching are routed through departmental heads rather than directly to the instructor – a small structural choice that removes the fear of retaliation and makes it more likely that students will actually use the thing.
Second, the association maintains a dedicated section of its website providing educational materials on psychological abuse, sexual violence, domestic violence, drink-spiking, and consent, with curated links to crisis lines and specialist advocacy centres. That’s a student association doing its own safeguarding education rather than leaving it to the institution – and doing it with the kind of plain, direct language that institutional comms teams tend to sand down into uselessness.
The biggest social event of the year is the annual gala ball – around 800 students for dinner, entertainment, and dancing, plus a student video competition called the RU-Musical. Each departmental union holds its own annual celebration alongside.
The association also publishes Háskólablaðið, a student newspaper that comes out once a year – making it possibly the least frequent newspaper in the Nordic countries, though in a university of 3,300 students it’s hard to see what would fill a second edition.
Heated seawater
After the meeting we walk five minutes downhill to Nauthólsvík – a geothermal beach with golden sand, a hot tub, a sauna, and seawater heated by mixing it with geothermal water pumped from boreholes.
It’s right next to the RU campus. Students go year-round, including in winter, including right now, in April, when it’s about four degrees out and the steam is rising off the water like something from a nature documentary.
We stand on the sand and look at people swimming in heated seawater next to a university campus and try to think of a UK equivalent. We can’t. The closest might be a campus with a decent view of a dual carriageway. Or maybe Swansea.
Someone suggests that the real lesson of the day isn’t the block model or the personal development strand or the AI policy or the credited mentoring – it’s that if you put a university next to a geothermal beach, everything else sort of follows. This is probably not an “actionable insight”, sadly.
More tomorrow when we’ll be in a cellar.
