“The coronavirus pandemic forced us to study remotely”

Last week, Anja Justinussen, 34, and Elsbet Bjartalíð Danielsen, 31, were able to celebrate the completion of their thesis on the cand.merc.aud course at Copenhagen Business School. The bachelor’s degree is completed six years after they both started a bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration at the Centre. 

When they both started their bachelor’s degree in economics & business administration at the Center in the summer of 2019, they could not possibly have known how different the study conditions would be. In early spring 2020, all teaching was moved to Zoom as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We went to the Center when Covid-19 started”, says Elsbet. “And that’s why we took a lot of our bachelor’s degree from home. This meant that we were already ready to study at CBS by distance learning. When it is not mandatory to attend CBS, we could stand as full-time students on site, although we took it from the Faroe Islands for me and Anja from Croatia. we have applied to CBS for a dispensation for that.” 

In the program of economics and business at the University of Iceland, students take a mixture of subjects within economics (nationaløkonomi in Danish) and business science (virksomhedsøkonomi in Danish), respectively. The required subjects are composed in such a way that the bachelor’s degree gives access to both master’s degrees in economics and business administration at universities outside the country. In Copenhagen, bachelors in economics and business studies have thus furthered their studies at both the University of Copenhagen and the Copenhagen Business School. 

Anja and Elsbet chose to pursue a bachelor’s degree at CBS, where they have now written a thesis on the auditing profession together. 

Elsbet explains the thesis as follows:

“The title of our thesis is “Er audisorbranchen i fare?”, because for many years it has been difficult to capture the interest of young people and to get them to go further to become state-authorised. the retirement age in the coming years.”

At the Icelandic Academy of Sciences, they both also wrote their final bachelor’s thesis together. And perhaps the bachelor’s thesis gave an indication of their interest in business topics, because they wrote about “corporate social responsibility” in the aquaculture industry in Faroe Islands under the heading “How the aquaculture industry is sustainably shaped by interest groups and regulations”.

Elsbet has three children and works at the administration department at the Icelandic Oceanographic Institute, while Anja has one child and lives in Croatia, where she is still enrolled at CBS, because she is missing one semester of her studies. 

The Center admits new courses in economics and business studies every summer. The deadline for applications to the program is now 1 July 2025 with the start of studies in August at the latest.