University Insights: Linguists and shutterbugs

Welcome to the fourth and final post in our Dropbox University Insights series. In these posts, we’ve been taking aggregated usage data* from Dropbox users at universities around the world, and surfacing interesting trends. For our closing Insights post we’re taking a look at two different forms of communication: one old, and one relatively new. For most of us, language is our default method of communication — be it written, spoken, or signed. But photographs can be a powerful communication tool as well, especially in the digital age with tools like Instagram and Snapchat. So for this final post, we’re looking at linguists and shutterbugs — schools with with the most language diversity, and schools uploading the most photos. Linguists The larger the school is, the more likely it is to have students who are speaking different languages. But we wanted to keep the playing field level for smaller schools, too. So for our linguists category, we looked at the highest probability that two random students at any given school have their Dropbox accounts set to different languages. Here are the global top five:

1. University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
2. Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (Brazil)
3. Free University of Bozen (Italy)
4. University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
5. Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland)

At the top school, University of Fribourg, there’s a 68% chance that two random Dropbox users will be using Dropbox in a different language than each other. Europe claims 18 of the global top 20 schools — Switzerland leads the way with seven, and Portugal has three. The top school in Asia is Japan’s Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and for the US it’s the New England Conservatory of Music. Shutterbugs Next we looked at our shutterbugs, the students who are capturing lots of those memorable college moments on their smartphones. To get this list, we ranked the schools whose students have added an average of 300 or more photos to their Dropbox accounts per month via our Camera Upload feature:

1. Dublin City University (Ireland)
2. Higher Colleges of Technology (United Arab Emirates)
3. University of Iceland (Iceland)
4. Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil)
5. University of Dublin, Trinity College (Ireland)

Irish students are definitely snapping a lot of pictures on their phones — two of the top five shutterbug universities are in Ireland. The other nation that features more than once in the top 20 was the United Arab Emirates, with the Higher Colleges of Technology listed above, as well as the United Arab Emirates University which came in 15th. That’s it for our University Insights series! But our Campus Cup competition is still going strong, so make sure you sign up before December 14, 2015, to earn extra Dropbox space. *Data from September 2014 – August 2015