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Studying abroad in China

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Studying abroad in China

In China, I studied as a regular exchange student for a full semester. I enrolled at the Beijing Institute of Technology for the winter term 2012 from September to December. At the BIT, I attended an Artificial Intelligence lecture, a Computer Graphics lecture as well as an intensive chinese course.

Campus and Accomodation

The BIT is a campus university as well, so everything you need is is reachable with a 15-minute walk. In fact, the campus is rather small (Wikipedia tells me there are some satellite campuses further away from the city center, but I didn't visit those), and a 20 minute walk takes you from one end to the other. In the center of the campus, there's the gymnasium with lots of volleyball fields, football fields and the like. The gymnasium was in fact used for the 2008 summer olympics and the paralympics (only volleyball and goalball, but still). I however didn't use the gymnasium, so I can't provide any insight on their quality.

The BIT campus seen from the main building

Again, food is good at the campus and very cheap, if you stick to the official canteens. I'm talking about 4 cents for 400g of rice cheap, so you can eat to your heart's content. However, there's a little problem: The dining hall's opening hours are relatively short (most people we talked to had dinner at 17:00, or 17:30 at the latest), and when you come late, there's only table scraps left. Also, the mass of students arriving for lunch and dinner was enormous. Since there was only a short time for eating, it was very crowded. For these reasons, I mostly at at one of the many other restaurants on campus, which also provided very good food for a bit of a higher price.

My accomodation was sufficiently nice. It was a relatively small, shared room, maybe about 15 m² (always had nice roommates though, so it wasn't a problem) in the exchange student building, and 3 rooms shared a bathroom. The bathrooms were mostly a mess (which is to be expected with university students, I guess), and I had difficulties adapting to Squat Toilets. But everything was acceptable, so I really can't complain. Several of my fellow students took to searching for apartments outside the campus, but apartments in Beijing are also relatively expensive, and the process seemed to be rather laborious (including registering at the police, finding a real-estate agent etc.). That said, I paid about 7500 yuan (800 €) for three months, so rent was still a bit expensive. On the other hand, the chinese students slept 6 people in the same size room, and did not have a bathroom in their apartment at all. In the mornings and evenings, people were walking around in bath slippers and pyjamas to take a shower, and that at -10°C. I should probably be glad that I was able to take a nice warm shower in the apartment instead of having to walk around first.

Also, we paid for both heating and internet. There was a heating element in our room, but it never got warm enough, so I turned on the aircondioning additionally, which added up to a fee of maybe about 200 CNY in toto. Internet was a bit more frustrating: It was slow, cost 200 CNY per month, and additionally, the Great Firewall rather diminished the usefulness of internet access.

Everything on the campus was rather grubby too, but I think that is a cultural difference. We Germans are known as neat freaks anyway, so this wouldn't surprise me. However, functionally, the campus was good too, as the library was rather nice, and the rooms were sufficient (but rather cold).

Academics

I was unable to ascertain whether the BIT provided any lectures in English before the end of September, which was rather stressful. The BIT prides itself on providing many courses of study in English (see the of programs here), but we found just two computer science lectures that were mostly in English. Artificial Intelligence was held in Chinese, with English materials (as a book, we used Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach). The lecture was possible to follow, but we would have spent less time just learning from the book.

The exchange student building at the left

Computer graphics was actually held in English (we used the book Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments: From Realism to Real-Time), and the Professor made an effort to integrate us two exchange students.

Lectures were just two hours a week, and at the end we wrote an exam in both subjects. The exam was mostly reproductive, asking questions that had been answered in the last lecture before the exam. Most other exchange students studied subjects related to business, and there seemed to be a larger amount of English lectures for those subjects. Howeve, from what I heard, didactic quality wasn't too high either.

Finally, I also participated in a Chinese language course. The Chinese language course was about 16 hours a week, and thus, a rather intensive course. The lessons were held by three teachers that were themselves students at other Universities. They were motivated and made an effort to teach us, although the didactic structure of the lessons was strongly focused on memorising, and relatively light on grammar. However, I believe that this is due to the Chinese language, which simply doesn't have easy rules of grammar, so often the only way to learn is memorisation (for example, there is no useful way to memorise Chinese characters, except some very broad classifications that harm more often than they help).

I believe that didactically, China is still a bit behind other countries. We even spoke to some Chinese education students that wanted to go to Germany in order to learn how to teach better, and import German didactic methods to Germany.

While the process lifelong learning seems to be helped by the peculiarities of the Chinese language, I believe that these peculiarities also harm in another department. Namely, the development of rules and study of principles that explain more than memorised facts. However, since I don't speak Chinese that well, and only attended English lectures and a Chinese course, this impression may be entirely false.

Seeing China

While the quality of life for an exchange student in Singapore was slightly better than in China, China has much more to offer from a cultural standpoint. While Singapore's culture is a mix of Western, Chinese, Indian and Malaysian influences, China is authentically Chinese. The culture was fun to explore (even accidentally ordering tripe soup), and Beijing has lots of sights that are fun to explore.

The university is next to a subway station, and about 15 minutes walking takes you from the exchange student's building to the subway station Weigongcun. From there, most places in Beijing can be reached within about an hour of subway riding, including the Forbidden City, the Olympic Stadion, Temple of Heaven, Confucius Temple and innumerable other sights. Entrance fees are relatively cheap and there's lots to see. I was never bored in Beijing, because there was always somewhere to go.

A park on the BIT campus

Also, Beijing has a vibrant nightlife and several "party" districts that cater to Chinese and Expats. Of particular mention is Sanlitun and Ghost street, where there is food and drink galore (but expensive). For students, Wudaokou seems to be the preferred nightspot, with lots of clubs having open every day. Of course, try not to get in any trouble, as the police generally doesn't speak English, and the tourist police isn't open at night.

All in all, Beijing is the magnificent capital of a magnificent country, and you'd do well to do a bit of travelling in China after having finished your exchange semester.

Conclusion

Having said all that, would I visit Beijing as an exchange student again? Yes, but not at the BIT. BIT seemed a bit overwhelmed having to deal with English-speaking exchange students, and academically, my stay was a bust. The intensive chinese course was nice, and if you can afford it academically, maybe go to BIT only for the Chinese course. So the "student" part of exchange student wasn't that great.

However, I enjoyed living in China for a period of time. While the language was rather difficult to learn and employ, the great sights and friendly people made my stay worth the frustration that sometimes came with it.

Studying in Singapore

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Studying in Singapore

As I've mentioned before, my two-month stay in Singapore was not a full exchange semester, but only a relatively short research internship at the School of Computer Engineering of the Nanyang Technological Institute of Technology. The program I attended was the Summer Research Internship program (for which registrations are still open!). The program (designed to lure qualified students to Singapore, I think) is an internship during which you write a research paper about a subject that you chose when applying. Accomodation is free, and the program even gives a generous amount of pocket mony (3000 SGD when I was there). Sounds good, right?

Campus and Accomodation

The NTU is a very well endowed university with a pretty campus and extremely well kept sports facilities. There's pretty flowers, a little lake and some chinese buildings. Also, since one of Singapore's national hobbies is eating, food on campus was plentiful, delicious and cheap. If you like south-east asian food, you will be happy here!

Accomodation is free on the campus (but only for us exchange students!), a fact that I learned to appreciate rather quickly, after reading up on Singapore's housing conditions. Rooms start at about 300 SGD per month, and those are often shared rooms (with about 4 to 5 other people per room).

My room in Singapore

Compared to the room I had in Germany (at the Studentenstadt in Munich, where I had a 16m² room with kitchen and bath), the room was a bit bigger, but was shared with another exchange student. Also the bath was shared with our neighbors (so 4 people per bathroom). More annoying was the lack of an aircondition. With 32°C throughout the day (and 30°C throughout the night), I relied on having an ice-cold shower every morning in order to wake up. We had a ceiling fan though, and that helped a bit at night.

Men and women were separated, and in fact the house rules forbid being on the women's floor, or even being in a woman's room when the door was closed. Well, when in Rome…

Academics

After some trouble with the selection of the subject of my paper, I selected (or rather, was assigned, since nobody seemingly wanted to have me) "A survey on crowd sourcing". Turns out I got the same subject as my roommate, so we had to share the subject. If this sounds badly organized, well… it was. Our professor didn't really have any clear questions for us, and this being a survey paper meant that there was lots of material to go through, without getting much of a direction. The guidance we were given consisted of a link to Google scholar.

The NTU gymnasium

Now, speaking to other exchange students, I got the impression that everyone rather liked their topic, so I guess it was just us that got the short end of the stick here. Nevertheless, when arranging an internship, I would expect the host to have some clear goal in mind, not just som busywork (which was what our work seemed like).

I repeat that this was probably just bad luck. Everyone else seemed happy with their project, and maybe I was just not suited for that kind of research.

All in all, the NTU was a very organized university. We were taken on trips, made some acquaintances with local students (just on the trip though, we didn't manage to organize another meeting). Equipment seemed to be available in abundance, the library was extensive (and very well refrigerated, erm. air-conditioned, it was about 16°C in there!) and had a snazzy checkin/checkout system as well as a lot of work computers.

Since I was there on an internship, I can't really comment on the quality of education at NTU, which is a pity, because I would have been interested in the quality such a moneyed institution puts out.

In fact, my overall impression was that the NTU is very similar to my home university, the Technical University of Munich. Everything was clean and organized, and there was a lot of material available for students. However, I had a feeling that studying was more institutionalized, without any "playfulness". I believe that studying in Singapore (and in Asia in general) is much more of an occupation, while in Germany, it is also an opportunity to change as a person.

Seeing Singapore

As might be guessed, the University did not place a high priority on their students having fun, so the Campus was almost at the end of the East-West MRT line, namely at the Pioneer MRT station. From there, you could take a free shuttle bus (that even has a nice website) that made the rounds through the Campus. A trip to central Singapore took about 45 minutes and the buses stopped running at 10 at night. So if you want to party all night, better save some money for taxi fare (thankfully, taxis are allowed to go into the campus, so if you want to, you can come home anytime you like).

I chose to follow the local custom, and didn't do much going out, so I can't tell you about the vibrant night life of Singapore (also, Tiger beer really isn't that good).

In any case, Singapore is expensive when doing something other than eating on campus. A cheapish restaurant meal runs you about 20 SGD at least, and that is without any extras. Cheap food (and a wide variety of it) can be had at many foodcourts all over Singapore (eating = national passtime, remember?), but once you've done that, there's not much else you can do on a budget.

Some examples: A ticket to the Jurong bird park (something that I would recommend), runs about 20 SGD (11 €). Not too bad? If you want to go to the Singapore Zoo as well, you pay 39 SGD (20 €). Finally, add the Night Safari, and you're at a whopping 69 SGD (which comes to about 30 €). While I would absolutely recommend these places, they're not for the budget-minded.

As is Singapore. Also, to be absolutely frank, I found Singapore a bit of a bore (more like Singabore, amirite?). Everything is immaculately clean and cultured, and while Singapore has some nice places (such as Chinatown, which I enjoyed very much), they all seem somewhat artificial. Singapore seemed like a theme park version of southeast Asia to me, and after a while, the charms wore thin. Do spend a few days there on layover, but don't plan a whole holiday around Singapore. Or at least, I wouldn't.

Conclusion

So, all in all, would I do the SRI again? Yes! My main gripes were the uninteresting research subject, and Singapore itself. The research subject was, as I mentioned before, bad luck. So if you take part in the SRI, be careful to choose a topic that interests you. If it doesn't, still think about it, but mind that this subject is what you will be doing most of the time.

About Singapore itself: I guess it can't be helped that Singapore is a bit boring by itself. But it lies in the vicinity of a great number of very interesting and beautiful places (Bali, Borneo and Malaysia come to mind), and as such, it is a great jumping-off point for exploring South-East Asia. Also, if you're not entirely sure Asia is for you, Singapore int too foreign. Everybody speaks (heavily-accented) English and you can get around very well. But in order to get a truly different cultural experience, go somewhere else. Maybe to China?