Birds Inhabiting in Alien Land:
Lives of UM Exchange Students

By Amoo Xu


Leo Lai, an exchange student of Business Administration, in Sweden
Usually, when mentioning exchange students of our school, we would first have a feeling of admiration or even envy. Most of us think of the lives of exchange students abroad in a single term: enjoyment. Yet this may be an over-simplified and narrow understanding. How do UM exchange students live overseas and how are their lives there different from their lives here? Leo Lai and Athas Yuan, who just came back from Europe before this semester, have all the fresh things to share with us.

Lai, from mainland China, is a year-four student of Business Administration, majoring in International Business. Last year, he went to Sweden as an exchange student. He studied in Stockholm University in the Swedish capital, and experienced both happiness and hardship. He found great differences between studying in UM and Stockholm University. The first difference, according to Lai, is the course arrangement. "It's totally different from what I have got used to when studying in UM. At the very beginning, I was quite unaccustomed and I began to adapt myself to all these changes," Lai said.

According to Lai, in Stockholm University, actually in 72 percent of public universities in Sweden as well, students have formally only two lectures of the same course per week. In the whole month students just focus on this particular course until they finish it at the end of the month. Students then continue to concentrate on another course in the following month. Hence there are only four courses each semester which are scheduled into four different months.

However, till this stage, the doubt still remains:are studies of exchange students this easy? Actually the answer is "no". Lai said: "When I first heard of my schedule, I was shocked and also thought that I accidentally came to paradise! ... But later I realized this was a much harder task than I have ever had in UM." He also said that the reason why Stockholm University provides so few lectures per week is that they want students to focus on it and learn it well. Due to the relatively low class time, the school also requires students to do advanced self-study after class. "This kind of 'requirement' is unheard of, but it does exist," said Lai. The monthly seminar is the time to test whether students do their self-studies.

When being asked what he thinks of his study in Sweden, Lai used one sentence to summarize it: "It did help me to recognize the significance of extracurricular study and improve my ability of self-study!"

Yuan, another year-four student from Business Administration, also went to Europe last semester. He pointed out that actually the daily lives of exchange students are not that enjoyable as what might be expected. The university where he studied is Hassel University in Belgium. He said that the very high cost of living is the main hardship for him to study in Belgium, which is also a common problem for Chinese exchange students to study in Europe. He said: "My parents earn around HK$5,000 per month and one meal in an ordinary restaurant would cost me more than 15 euros, which is nearly HK$200. So how dare could I eat outside everyday?" He pointed out that a majority of the Chinese exchange students, as far as he knew, lived very modest lives there. "Because it's hard for students without a citizenship ID to find even a part-time job in Belgium, we can only reduce our living expenses by cooking by ourselves," he said.

They went to faraway markets rather than supermarkets to buy fresh vegetables and meat on weekends. According to Yuan, similar food in supermarkets would cost twice as much as they were in the markets. And every two or three days they would cook once after school and eat for one or two days. Yuan said that 60 percent of the Chinese exchange students of Hassel University had scholarships from their home schools, which meant they paid no tuition fee, but still nearly 100 percent of them cooked by themselves. Moreover they tried to cut living expenses in many other aspects. For example, they would wash their clothes themselves rather than paying the school laundries. Despite all these, Yuan is still very positive. He expressed: "We do not think this is miserable for us. The quite hard lives provided us a chance to lean living skills while studying course knowledge ... after I came back this semester I found myself much more independent than ever before!"

Every academic year, UM sends exchange students to Europe for further studies, which has been a tradition and a feature of its programming. Students do appreciate the experience. Lai said: "This is my last year at UM before I graduate! After I got used to the self-study methods in Stockholm and applied them here, I found I can study much more effectively than ever before."