By Amandip Singh Grewal, student at the Danish School of Media and Journalism

The air is brisk but frigid like the rest of the minimalist surroundings. A constant echoing hum from the young men in minimalist suits and women dressed in black coats and trendy shoulder bags fills the room. The clicking heels on cold marble tiles echo in the big hall at Solbjerg Plads. With his nose in the air, a gentleman dressed in a pale grey scarf – but otherwise wearing black from head to toe – walks briskly out of the facade’s glass doors. His elegant and slick light blond bob swings in perfect harmony with his black leather briefcase. The sound from his dress shoes reproduces a clicking echo. Click, clack. Garish colors would stand out a mile here.

At Solbjerg Plads people are posh and snobbish

We are at the stronghold of Frederiksberg at Solbjerg Plads. A square that radiates peace in the green and calm surroundings. The smell from spruce needles on the mahogany-colored trunks is subtle. The sun barely peeks over the rooftops of the city, but is reflected in the colossal and immaculate glass facade at the back of the matt and cold grey concrete building – disrupted only by the sparkling blue logo with white stripes.

Sabrina Sohana Bhuyan studies International Business Communication at CBS. She feels as though she doesn’t fit in at Solbjerg Plads – unless she dresses professionally.

”I think Solbjerg can be a bit scary. It’s very big and posh. It’s as if you have to act a certain way. There’s a perception that people at Solbjerg are a little more posh, dress more fashionably and are a little snobbish. You can’t sit like this at Solbjerg Plads. Not quite, right? Not quite”. She wrinkles her nose and looks up and down at her colorful bird-motif sweater, her hands fidgeting, and continues: ”I get the impression that students from Solbjerg look down on us students from Dalgas. I guess there’s some sort of hierarchical order of the education programs. The communication studies are at the bottom and the business studies are at the top”.

CBS is no longer a ‘purely’ economics-only business school. More and more so-called ‘soft’ studies from the fields of humanities and social sciences have been introduced to the business school’s curriculum, thereby attracting two types of student crowds: Economics and finance students who are primarily found at Solbjerg Plads, and the ‘soft science’ humanities and communication students who are primarily found in Dalgas Have.

You have to look decent at Solbjerg Plads

A few meters down the hall at Solbjerg Plads, the enormous glass doors shoot open every half a minute or so. Here, the warmth from the massive cherry wood floor stands in stark contrast to the metal grey staircase. The staircase continues into infinity and merges into a quadratic spiral of glass and metal. Here, students sit with their noses buried in their laptops, tapping away at their keyboards. Even the smallest of sounds triggers their falcon-like stares. You always feel watched here.

The deafening silence is momentarily disrupted by an elderly gray-haired gentleman wearing glasses. With a lifted finger and heavy steps, he grumpily asks a woman to either take off her stilettos or put something underneath them.

”You feel a bit exposed at Solbjerg Plads because it’s a large room. There’s the two-floored canteen made of glass and a large room where people stand everywhere. Right where you enter, people stand everywhere”, says Sebastian Rosenmejer, an alumni graduate in Business Administration and Organisational Communication. Additionally, he says he tends to straighten his back a bit more when he walks through Solbjerg Plads: “Yesterday, I went to Solbjerg Plads in the afternoon and it was raining outside. When I stepped inside, I was a bit embarrassed to be wet and walking around dripping, because it just doesn’t look decent to be all soaked and dripping everywhere. Because – when you stand in the hall at Solbjerg – you never feel quite alone”.