Travel Report Nagoya University of Commerce & Business
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Travel Report Nagoya University of Commerce & Business Spring 2014 These are my honest experiences about my master level exchange term at the Nagoya University of Commerce & Business. The comments and insights are based only on my observations and insights and do not represent the general view on this university. 1. Preparations before the exchange After Aalto Biz has nominated you for NUCB you have to send several documents to NUCB. Compared to my other exchange term in bachelors level this is not too much work. The documents are returned to Aalto’s international office so you don’t have to mail anything to Japan. Here are the documents required by the UNCB: 1. Application form 2. CV/Resume 3. 2 copies of Passport 4. Document for proof of English Proficiency (Not required from Aalto students) 5. Essay "Details your reasons for choosing to study at NUCB Graduate School/in Japan” – one page (This can be almost the same as what you wrote to Aalto but make sure you change some of the parts in order to match NUCB’s requirements) 6. Official transcripts from your school 7. Application for Certificate of Eligibility (Visa document) 8. 3 photos (color copy is NOT acceptable) 40mm x 30mm/Should write your name on the back of the each photo 9. Bank statement or Financial statement (Cost 5 euros in Nordea) After few months you will get your Certificate of Eligibility accepted by the Japanese immigration bureau. When you receive this you will be able to apply Visa from the Japanese embassy. You will get the Visa within a day or two. However, when thinking in retrospect, it might be better if you don’t apply for the Visa. I’ll discuss about this later in this paper. The airport procedures are very smooth going as well and I faced no problems. The trains from the airport to Nagoya leave almost every 10 minutes, costs 870 yen and takes around 40 minutes. You will also automatically apply for the scholarship provided by the NUCB or Jasso. NUCB has two types of scholarships depending on your GPA. Your GPA decides also in which student residence you will be living at. I received scholarship number two which was 30,000 yen per month and got offered the residence in Higashiyama that was a lot fancier than the cheaper Chiyoda but a little bit further away from the city. You will be put automatically to either one these residences so you don’t have to stress at all about finding a place to stay. These residences are relatively affordable but if you want, you can look for your own housing as well. Make sure you also have travel insurance before you fly to Japan. Normally travel insurances are valid max. 45 days so you’ll need to buy extra time for your insurance. I bought insurance from Eurooppalainen and in cost around 200 euros and it was the most affordable option in the market. 2 Another important thing you have to do right after Aalto has nominated you is to apply for exchange scholarship money offered by KY. I got around 700 euros, which covered my flight tickets. Problems and comments Only problem or surprise that I faced before going to Nagoya was that I had to pay for the whole stay at once and I had two weeks to make a transfer of 302,000 yen (around 2000 euros). I had to raise my student loan from the bank because I didn’t have enough money on my bank account at that time. Also in the same e-mail it was stated that if my GPA was lower than 2.20 in Term 1, I had to pay back the whole scholarship of 85,000 yen in Term 2. This felt unfair since they announced this when my exchange was already confirmed. In other words, first they use carrot and then when you’ve already signed for everything they tell that you have to give the carrot back if you don’t follow the rules. To pay the rent was also quite pricey (around 20 euros) and complicated since they don’t use IBAN. The fact that there was a possibility that I have to pay back the scholarship put a lot of pressure on me and the first term was no way stress free or something I’ve used to in Finland since there was now a money incentive. Nevertheless, as a new exchange student I didn’t have any experience or knowledge about how demanding the courses were so I didn’t know the standards. Although it was generous of them to give me this scholarship I think it was not communicated correctly in the application process. Exchange students should be notices of any possible future payments. By the time of sending the application documents to NUCB, they only mentioned that in order to get the scholarship your GPA has to be over certain level in our home universities before the beginning of the exchange studies. This was however not the only surprise when I went there. I will talk about the other surprises in the latter parts of his paper. The campus was located in the center of Nagoya and was easy to find. I went to Nagoya 5 days before the check-in date, which was probably a little bit too much. Two or three days would have been enough to get rid of the jet lag and get to know the city. They had a specific check-in date where they drove us to our residence and gave us all information and documents needed. 2. Exchange studies The courses were part of the English-speaking program called the Global Leader Program. GLP is an MBA program that adopts many aspects from the American MBA system. This is good to keep in mind because in many aspects such as in assignments and lectures MBA education differs from Master of Science degrees what we are studying in Aalto. In brief, MBA is more practically oriented using a lot of case studies. In addition, the assignments don’t have to follow academic style and often more practical business like styles are appreciated. Starting your studies The school started on Monday the 31st of March by a weeklong orientation week. The orientation week was quite relaxed and didn’t contain too many activities. The first day included mostly general information about the school and living in Nagoya, and 3 we had lunch with the other exchange students together with the program coordinators. The next day we had an opening ceremony at the Nisshin campus which is quite far away from the city center and takes around one hour metro and buss ride to get there. The ceremony was very long but after the ceremony all exchange students were invited to have lunch with the president and the professors. However it did feel weird that only the international students were invited to have lunch and drink champagne with the president. It made us feel special but I also started to think if the Japanese students also got the same treatment. I think that at this point it is appropriate to mention that NUCB tries very hard to become an international university and sometimes their means to achieve this might feel weird for a person like me and other exchange students. For instance when you enter the Fushimi campus lobby, all you can see is many international flags and posters about their rankings and accreditations to make an international impression. In the opening ceremony all international students were seated along the middle isle where at least four photographers took pictures of us so that the parents of the Japanese students, who were watching the ceremony from the upper stand, could see how international the school was. In reality however, at least at the MBA level, there were only two Japanese students taking the English-speaking program. The rest of the students taking English-speaking classes were exchange students and double degree students coming overseas. Maybe it’s an Asian or Japanese way of trying to make a good impression to show only the good sides of yourself and hide the bad ones. The next day we went to do the registration at the Wards Office. Our student coordinator was with us because the office personnel didn’t speak English at all. At this point we were told that we have to pay the Japanese health care insurance even if we had travel insurance from home since it was mandatory. This came as a surprise and I started to think that it would have been better not to apply for the Japanese visa and just come here with a student visa because you can stay 90 day in Japan with a tourist visa and if you travel abroad, for instance to Korea, you get new 90 days when you come back. I’m not sure how they calculated my insurance premium because I got a different sum every month but in average I paid around 12 euros a month. It is not too much but it feels somewhat unnecessary because I was already covered by my own insurance. I also asked my other friend who was studying in Tokyo and she didn’t have to pay any Japanese insurance, which kind of made me think if there was a misunderstanding about the mandatory nature of the insurance fee. Japanese are generally very honest people but there are sometimes issues with the transparency. General Information about the courses As I was doing master level exchange the courses were part of an English language MBA program called The Global Leader Program.