- Visited Bea in the afternoon

- attended the first lesson

Basically, Bea is the one I have been contacting since I was confirmed by NUS as exchange student. She has helped me extensively on mapping my modules, finding the right accommodation and mostly Visa application.

Among the three things, housing has been the smoothest with only one change. I have done three versions of module mapping and the Visa takes 3 months to get finally settled.

To be frank, I was quite frustrated by certain things happened during the preparation time which delayed my arrival quite significantly. But since I know a classmate of mine is also coming to TU/e next semester, I think it may be good I explain to Bea where the problems were because she may not be able to see the whole picture from her perspective.

The talk turned out to be very useful to both sides especially for me to understand her difficulty in processing my case as a rare exception. Firstly, according to her, there has not been an Asian exchange student coming in the past 5 years since she took the position. The department has a complete procedure for international student studying full time master course, but not for international exchange student in general. Secondly, my case was further complicated because I am a Chinese national and need to get extra documents such as the NESO certificate She was not aware of that because she is not directly involved in the VISA application which is done by the university’s VISA department. Thirdly, the Dutch immigration has recently changed their visa policy and significantly lengthens the application process. There are 2 Turkish exchange students who suppose to come this semester withdrawed also because of delay in VISA. Bea said she is also very fed-up about all the bureaucracy involved in the process and she is willing to minimize them as much as possible.

To make our exchange experience a better one, she took her own time to compile a booklet of exchange students now in TU/e so that we can make new friends more easily.

The first lecture I go to is called Development Study by Prof Szirmai. He spoke quite good English, so I have no problem to follow. His lecture is quite funny because he uses many stories to illustrate his points.

One thing I find quite different from NUS students is that TU/e students really filled up the first few rows without being asked. And just like in NUS, there are students who closely followed the lecture as well as those don’t take it seriously. There is this Dutch guy sitting in the second row who asks questions when the professor says “is there any questions” and answers the prof’s questions. Furthermore, when the Prof mixes up his transparency slides, he could accurately tell him that he stops at the left stack two slides back. So this has totally changed my perception that western student don’t study as hard as Asians.

I arrived at the house around 6 and soon my housemates all arrived back as well.

Soon after we finished the meal, a really interesting chat started. Maybe it is because we are all international students, so we are interested in similar topics. The conversation started from our study. Since the Ethiopian Guy is a regular and have studied for 1 year already, he told us more about the stories in TU/e.

Then our conversation continues into why everybody choose to come to NL and the Ethiopian guy started to complaining about why he got mislead by the university that all courses are taught in English where actually many are in Dutch. And exactly because of that reason, he has given up some equally good German university just because they specified some lessons are compulsory in German.

And Visa is definitely another hot topic. The Ethiopian guy is expecting a few juniors coming this year, but none turned up later. And we basically held the same attitude towards Dutch Immigration department (IND).

In the end, we also fixed the cleaning schedule of the house.

 

 

 

 

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