Hi! I’m Patricia Monique Gunawan and people call me Monique. I am an Industrial Engineering’s Universitas Surabaya (Class of 2016) student and currently now I am working. In this article I want to tell you about my student exchange experience. I went to National Taiwan University and Technology for the exchange program. The program started at September 2019 and end up at January 2020. No, the coronavirus or COVID-19 novel was after I got home.
First, I want to tell you about the school I chose. Why I chose NTUST? It’s because NTUST was one of the best University in Taiwan and also in NTUST we can chose over thousand course and even some course in another major and on different level. In NTUST, there were many Indonesian that willing to help you with all their heart and also the professors there was polite to foreign student like us. They’ll remember our name so they can have a good relationship with us and even some professor gave us some full semester scholarships with pocket money. But in my case, I don’t get any scholarships and extra pocket money because I was being focused on learning Mandarin. And also, in Taiwan all of the school has the different system with ours in Indonesia. Something I like about learning in Taiwan is that you can drop the class after the mid-term-test if you think you cannot pass the class.
Learning in Taiwan was fun, everyone there willing to help people also student in Taiwan is very passionate about their job being a student. They are so diligent, studying everytime, submitting the homework before the deadline and also willing to help us if we not understand with the subject even also the teacher. As I am learning a new language which is Mandarin and everyone know how complicated Mandarin is, the teacher there were persuading and supporting so we won’t give up. And also, I take some of pirvate mandarin class so I could improve more.
Doing exchange student program was really an experience for me. Some of them is because I could not speak any their language and that made me afraid to enters some restaurant and buying food, troubling to control my cashflow because finding something cute, got my Tugas Akhir from UBAYA that I need to finish. Finishing Tugas Akhir in another country was difficult, there’s nobody to consult with, communication with e-mail is the most efficient way and sometimes even we communicate a lot somehow the results is not optimum. But overall, it was the best choices I ever made while I was in college and I recommend you to try the program, I bet you’ll have no regret and definitely it makes some changes in your life.
