National Chengchi University, Taipei Exchange report Autumn 2014 K90367 Congratulations! If you are reading this it means you have either been selected to go to National Chengchi University, also known as NCCU, or you are at least considering it as an option. I hope you make the same great decision that I did and get to experience the beauty of Taiwan! Preparing for the exchange semester Application and health check If you are attending the autumn semester starting in the beginning of September, you will be contacted by the lovely Cherry Huang of the OIC around mid-April and asked to do an online application. This is a mere formality, and there should be no problems in getting accepted. The official application process is a pretty straightforward one, where you just fill in a simple online form. NCCU wants you to do a health check for the application; this can be done in Finland or once you’ve arrived. I had problems getting the health check done on time in Finland as the queues at YTHS were as bad as always, but I can very much recommend doing it after arriving to Taipei. The process is very simple and much less hassle than in Finland (they know exactly what to do, whereas the Chinese forms can cause confusion at YTHS). The university gives you directions and an approximate time, and you are in and out of the facility in less than 20 mins (blood tests, lung x-rays, all that jazz at a cost of around 10€). Recommended vaccinations include Hepatitis A+B, and some also opt for the Japanese Encephalitis-vaccine, which as a disease is very rare yet kills you if you manage to be very unlucky and catch it. Vaccines are cheaper to get in Taiwan (specially for the Japanese Encephalitis), thus I would recommend getting them there. Visa and flights As a Finnish or EU citizen, you can enter Taiwan without a visa, as tourists are given 90 days on arrival and a simple visit outside Taiwan is enough to renew this. However this does require that you have an outgoing ticket already that takes you out of the country in the 90 day-period. You can also get a single entry visa (about 70€) or a multiple-entry visa from the consulate quite easily (few days), but at least I put that 70€ towards my flight to Singapore instead of getting a visa. For the flights, I booked mine just about 3 weeks before departure. I opted to arrive to Taipei just a few days before the orientation day, as I had housing sorted out already. Flights at that time were around 400€ one way and 750€ return (for return around Dec/Jan), so I chose to get just a one-way ticket as I didn’t have a good idea about when my courses would be finished, if I wanted to travel afterwards and where I would even fly to from Taipei. The hassle of trying to change bookings is not for me. The autumn semester at NCCU officially ends at the end of January, but depending on the courses you take, you can be finished as early as mid-December. Most of the exchange student-heavy courses end just before Christmas, as everyone is eager to get home for the holidays (or to get traveling..). Buddies NCCU has a buddy system, where each exchange student is assigned two “buddies” that welcome you to the NCCU and Taipei. They will contact you through Facebook and possibly even come to the airport when you arrive. I would strongly suggest to get to know your buddies, as they can help you with many things and they are an easy way of getting to know the local culture, as otherwise you will mostly hang out with other exchange students. After Arrival Courses The courses offered at NCCU vary a little from year to year. As a little surprise, the courses mentioned in earlier exchange reports year after year were not available to us this time. The university offers some exchange student-only courses (undergraduate/graduate) and it’s possible to choose from the regular course selection as well as from the iMBA courses. For the regular courses, you “apply” to them in an online system just like the local students, and you get results sometime in September. Apparently these are relatively hard to get into because of the number of students so enroll to anything that suits your schedule and interest (if you have to take four courses and enroll to only four, you most likely will not get into any of them). The university has an add-and-drop period, when it is possible to visit the classes and try to get in. The exchange-only courses have a separate online enrollment system, and these are easier to get into. The enrollment for the iMBA courses is done directly to Cherry beforehand, and for those it is very likely that you get the courses you wanted, as the iMBA student body is much smaller. The Chinese Language Center also offers Chinese courses to exchange students. Requirements for the courses varied quite a bit, with iMBA focusing on group work. iMBA also has a strict attendance policy, whereby you can still miss some lessons but after the limit they are very inflexible. Personally I would recommend taking as many iMBA courses as possible, as they seemed to be of better value in terms of learning and the level of teaching. Even if they have long seminar days, the days don’t actually feel that long due to discussions, videos and breaks. Chinese Business in Global Perspectives, iMBA (6ETCS) I didn’t finish this course due to time constraints, but I sat through enough lectures so I decided I’d include it. A quite broad course about Chinese business conducted by a very sweet professor. Lessons included topics on e.g. the car industry, history of Chinese business and it’s development, e-commerce, environmental factors etc. Interesting as such and the professor was good, but the execution of certain things could have been better (like students having 1,5h presentations about materials everyone was supposed to have read anyway). Lessons every week for 3 hours, grade based on two presentations and a term paper. Venture Capital & Entrepreneurship, iMBA (6ETCS) Quite the funny course. The professor Chester Ho is himself an angel investor focused on biotech, and the lectures gave a rough idea about how venture capital works and how entrepreneurship should be done. The lectures had visitors (e.g. young entrepreneurs his VC firm has invested in such as the founders of the app Jink and his friend who had been working at Amazon) and lots of discussion, TEDtalks videos and personal stories. We also created business ideas in groups and pitched them to the class. Grade based on participation, the final pitches in the VC competition and so forth. “Do not worry about the grades, I just hope you learn something on the way”. The course was a seminar course, meaning 6 meetings on selected weekend days (either Sat or Sun) from 9am to 6pm, with long breaks. Would recommend as the course was very different to Aalto courses and the professor was a legend. Confucianism and Leadership, iMBA (6ETCS) Probably the best course I took. The course was about leadership but with a Confucian twist: we discussed the analects of Confucius, their relation to leadership and what it means to be a good leader. The professor was extremely passionate about his teaching, and although it was sometimes a bit much, it was still a great experience. This was also a seminar-style course, with three 9-hour meetings on weekends and a two days-overnight seminar camp at a local hotel. Grade was based on individual self-reflections and weekly group presentations/ reports, 5 each. Required some effort, but it was worth it. If anything, the course really made one think about leadership, ethics, moral and taught giving and receiving feedback. Mandarin Chinese, CLC (6 ETCS) Chinese for beginners: you get to choose between “reading, writing, speaking and listening” and just conversational courses. I chose the former, as I wanted to learn the characters (hanzi). Both options have lessons twice a week for 3 hours at a time, for 9 weeks. The course comes with a cost (around €250), but the Chinese Language Center gives you this money back as a scholarship if you don’t miss more than two classes and score at least 80% as your final grade. Around half of the students succeed in this. The course is somewhat demanding with quizzes almost every class and as one can imagine, learning the characters (recognition and drawing), pinyin (the western way of writing the words; obviously no Chinese person has any idea what it means) and the pronunciation of the words isn’t exactly child’s play. The course is well worth it regardless, as you learn the basics and get a deeper understanding of the culture at the same time. Grade consists of attendance, quizzes, homework and the final exam, which has a written part and an oral part. How to Exploit Innovativeness, exchange course (4ETCS) This course was my “had-to-take” choice, as I needed two 4-credit courses to fill the remaining 6 credits. Funny enough, the course was conducted by an Aalto professor (from the engineering side) and as she was just visiting Taipei, it was arranged as an intensive course during a two-week period. The course was mainly good for undergrad level and incredibly easy (there was nothing university-like in the course, unfortunately).