Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

Exchange Report Institut Teknologi Bandung

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

I spent an amazing spring semester at Bandung, Indonesia in spring 2014. This report tells about my experiences during my exchange semester. I hope this is useful for people who are planning to go on exchange in Bandung in the future.

Before exchange Before I left to Indonesia, I had to send an application to the exchange university and apply for visa. To apply to ITB (Institut Teknologi Bandung) I had to submit the following documents to the local exchange coordinator: -

Letter of reference from home university

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Academic report/transcript

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Copy of valid passport

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Copy of health insurance card

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Two pieces of passport-size photos

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A completed student exchange form (including information about educational background, basic personal information, a statement of purpose and list of courses planned to be taken.

These documents needed to be send by April 15th for those who enrolled in fall semester and by September 15th for those enrolling in spring semester. I got the e-mail where these documents were asked already on March, at the same time as the students who were enrolling to the fall semester, so I had plenty of time to send these documents. I sent the documents via airmail but I also e-mailed my student exchange form and statement of purpose to Anti Novarianti, the person in charge of exchange students. My statement of purpose was a short (1 page) description of myself, my studies and other experience, reasons for applying to ITB and my future plans. Visa is called socio cultural visa and it is valid for 60 days after entering Indonesia. You can extend it two times for one month at the time. Visa is only valid for one visit, so if you travel outside of Indonesia your visa expires immediately and you need a new one. Thus, I arranged my travelling so that I travelled only in Indonesia during the semester and after the semester I visited some other countries before coming back to Finland.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

Documents needed for visa, are described more specifically at Indonesian Embassy web page, but basically you need to submit acceptance letter from Indonesian school, certificate of economic survival (for example certificate of study grant paid by KELA) with the visa application and passport pictures. I submitted the documents to embassy and booked an appointment to fetch my visa. I applied the visa at the beginning of December and my visa was ready in couple of days after leaving my application. In order to get the visa, you also have to have a return ticket from Indonesia. I booked my flight tickets relatively late, in October and I left at the end of December. I wanted to get the acceptance letter from Indonesia before buying my tickets. Since it was quite near to my leaving date, I paid from my flights about 800 euros, return ticket Helsinki –!Singapore –! Helsinki. It was cheapest to book flight either to Bangkok or Singapore and then separate flight to Indonesia. I decided to buy my flight directly to Bandung airport but most of the other exchange students arrived to Jakarta and took shuttle bus to Bandung. I recommend flying to Bandung as you can get cheap flights there as well and it is much easier. Driver from the University picked me up from the airport and drove me to my new apartment. He didn’t speak any English but he was really nice and I understood some of his words so we could communicate a little.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

Institut Teknologi Bandung, ITB At the beginning of the semester we had one Orientation day for exchange students. This year it was held on 15th of January. It was more like couple of hours than a day, but during that we heard information about ITB, immigration and visa issues, Indonesian culture and we had a short campus tour. Courses started on 20th of January and my last day at University was 14th of April but I had couple deadlines for course assignments still on 22nd of April. As I am a master level student, I took only master courses from MBA program. The courses were 3 SKS which means that I had to take 3 courses to get 24 credits to my minor back in Finland. MBA semester lasted 12 weeks including midterm and final exam weeks. Classes were quite long, the morning class from 8 am to 1.30 pm and the second one from 2 pm to 7 pm, but there was only one class in a week per course. I had my courses on Mondays and Tuesdays, which meant that on Mondays I had quite long (11 hours) school day from 8 am until 7 pm but then I had a long weekend. It is mandatory to attend to the classes, as there is maximum of 20 % absences from the lectures in each course. In MBA courses this means that you can be absent two times per course. I was only exchange student in my courses, which was actually quite nice as I got to know more local students and they were really nice and helpful for me, and also interested to getting to know me. Also, I think it was really interesting to do all the group works with Indonesians. I have to admit that the first day of the semester was quite a shock for me. Even though the Orientation day was nice, I don’t feel that it was really useful what it comes to studying at ITB. At the first day I had difficulties to find the right classrooms and when I tried to ask help, people didn’t speak English. Finally I found out that all my courses were either cancelled or held in Bahasa Indonesia and I had to choose my courses again. No one informed me about this, and I just found out all this couple of minutes before my first class was supposed to start. In the end there was only around 6 courses held in English so it was quite easy to choose the new courses. There were no limitations from the university which courses I was able to choose, but I experienced these language limitations. I was really disappointed about this all as I was really waiting for couple of the courses I had registered on. Also, I was told beforehand that all the MBA courses would be in English, I felt cheated when I realized that this is not the case. The courses held in English were from different

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

topics: management, marketing, finance etc. First weeks I rearranged my courses couple of times and finally I took the following courses:

MM6015 Business Leadership by Yudo Anggoro and Yuni Ros Bangun Two teachers held this course: the first part was held by Yudo, extremely nice and friendly guy, speaking very good English. He was also very interested in my experiences in Indonesia. Teacher changed after the midterm exam and the new teacher was stricter and a bit scary older woman who expected people to understand what she thinks. She might stop some presentations because she didn’t like the way the students had done their group work or some small mistakes she found out. She also assumed that we are super humans who can read 20 pages long case material and prepare a presentation with nice power point slides in 20 minutes. The course consisted of several group works (which were mostly done during the class), individual best leadership project, two midterm exams (one take home exam and one open book exam in class), and couple of guest lecturers and final presentation, which was inspiring speech for the class. The course was interesting and relatively easy. The main content of the course was reading and analyzing different cases about leadership styles and good and bad leaders. We discussed a lot about these topics and I liked that the course was really practical. The evaluation criteria was the following: mid term exam 10 %, individual class preparation 10 %, group assignments 20 %, group discussions 10 %, personal Best Leadership Project 10 %, final test (presentation) 30 %.

MM6031 Branding and Marketing Communication by Reza A. Nasution This course caused me a lot of trouble at the beginning because of the teacher. The teacher didn’t want to have exchange students in his course and he kindly recommended me to choose some other course instead. I didn’t do that and I had to suffer from that. The teacher spoke almost half of the time in Bahasa Indonesia and I couldn’t understand anything. He also wanted me to attend to the whole day field trip to Jakarta, and it was held in Bahasa

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Spring 2014 k93558

Indonesia. Also, one guest lecture was held in Bahasa Indonesia but of course I had to sit there the whole time. It was really difficult to follow the teaching as the teacher was speaking a long time in language I couldn’t understand. Suddenly I realized that he is speaking English again and I had missed maybe something important. Overall, he was not that good teacher as his teaching method was mostly to leave us alone to the class to do some assignments, and when he came back after couple of hours, he wasn’t satisfied for what we had done and he left us again and gave more time. Still, he wasn’t happy for our assignments but he didn’t say what he really wanted us to do. The course included mainly midterm exam, weekly homework with your group and the final group project. The objective of the course was that after the course we could work as assistant brand managers. We talked about brand objectives, brand value chain and brand equity as well as brand performance measuring. This course was really interesting and the teacher was demanding so I had to work hard for this course. In the end I feel this was the most useful of my courses. The evaluation included individual concept mastering (class activity and assignments) 30 %, mid test 20 % and final project 50 %.

MM5012 Business Strategy and Enterprise Modelling by Harimukti Wandebori This course was least organized from my courses. I can’t say that I would have learned anything special from this course. We had to write every week summary of course book chapters and some reading materials. Also, each group had 2 case presentations during the course, and we had to return two longer individual projects: one at the midterm week, one at the final exam week. The course content was in business strategy. We learned about business-level strategies as well as corporate-level strategies, strategic leadership and also acquisition and restructuring strategies. This course included a lot of reading. The evaluation consisted of quiz and individual assignments (summaries of each chapters of the book) 10 %, participation and discussion 20 %, group assignments (two cases) 20 %, integrated paper 25 %, business model development project 25 %.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

In the end I survived well from my courses and got good grades even though I was afraid if I will even pass the courses because I didn’t know what the teachers expected from me at the beginning of the semester. There were a lot of assignments to do, but most of them weren’t that difficult. My classmates were really helpful and always helped me if I had something to ask. They were also really nice to do group work with, and I learned a lot from them during group assignments. The students were really interested in exchange students and they liked to have exchange students in their group and learn from them. I had to tell a lot of things from Finland to them.

Life in Bandung The weather in Bandung was quite warm during the whole spring semester. However, there was rainy season during our semester, which means that it rained couple of hours almost every day. So, rain poncho and umbrella were the basic equipment everyday. In spite of the rain an average temperature was 27C.

Accommodation, transportation & living costs It is easy to get apartment from Indonesia, as exchange coordinator, Anti Novarianti, will send you a list of three housing options. She sent this e-mail already in April. I didn’t have to apply the apartment; I just let Anti know which one I will pick. In the end I actually stayed in two different apartments during my exchange semester. The first month I stayed at Rooftop Residence. Next two months I stayed at Sky City Home, which is quite nice hotel near university. My rent there was 3.2 million Rupiah, which is about 200 euros. The rooms at Sky City Home were of different sizes so the rents between different rooms varied a little. Rooftop Residence was a nice place otherwise but I missed sink in a toilet, and privacy. There everyone could hear you to the lobby and you can hear everyone, as there was 5 cm whole between roof and wall in your room. This semester most of the exchange students lived at Sky City Home so it was also one reason it was better option for me. However, there are some pros and counts in both options. At Sky City Home you won’t have phone reception in your room and laundry service is not working as well as in Rooftop, but you have your privacy and a proper toilet. Employees of the hotel can also help you to order taxi, food etc. and they are really nice. At Rooftop you can better meet other students, as it is student apartment. It is also cheaper, offers really beautiful view from the rooftop and its

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Spring 2014 k93558

surroundings are more convenient than Sky City Home’s view to building site. However, I think that both are nice places to stay during the exchange semester, and I would prefer the one where most of the other exchange students are staying. Living costs at Indonesia are much cheaper compared to prices in Finland. You can still spend a lot of money for travelling and shopping. There are lots of outlets (for example Nike) at Bandung, and I heard from my Indonesian friends that people come to Bandung even from Jakarta for a weekend to do shopping. I, as most of the other exchange students as well, rented a scooter for my time in Bandung. It was cheap and the easiest way to move from place to place in crowded city of Bandung. It is really difficult to walk in Bandung because of the traffic. Also, I think the public transportation was quite difficult to use as there were thousands of minibuses called Angkots, but it was difficult to know where they are going because the drivers couldn’t explain that in English. When driving the scooter it is good to try to avoid police as they are trying to get your money because you are “bule”. I got one penalty because of doing U-turn and the police gave me five times bigger fee than he would have given for Indonesian. Taxis are cheap as well, so during the evenings I used often taxi as I was told that it is not safe to drive a scooter after 10 pm.

Free time During my time at Bandung, there was a new regulation from government that clubs and bars are open only until 12 pm. This was due to motorcycle gangs that had been killing people lately. We had bad luck with this, because the regulation started right before we arrived to Bandung. Due to the regulation we didn’t go out for partying that often. There is not that much to see in Bandung, and thus my favorite place was huge shopping mall called Paris van Java. There you can find a lot of stores, movie theatre and for example gym called Celebrity Fitness. I took 2 months membership to this gym and it was really nice place. It offers Les Mills classes such as BodyPump and BodyCombat, so it didn’t really matter even though the courses were held in Bahasa Indonesia as I knew anyways what to do.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

Culture Most of the Indonesians are Muslims. You can see and hear that everywhere in Bandung. There are praying rooms everywhere you go: at school, at shopping mall, gas stations etc. You can hear praying call 5 times a day and if you are at the school, the teacher will stop speaking for the time of praying call and your class mates might go to mushola to pray (praying room). Many people are wearing burkha, and due to religion there is also regulation for clothing at the school. You can’t wear sandals, and you should cover your chest, elbows and knees and also have collar in your shirt. Even though the regulation sounded quite strict at the beginning, I heard that it is not that strict really and for girls it is ok to wear blouse without collar. I also noticed many times that Indonesians didn’t act according to this regulation and especially many girls were using sandals. Food at Indonesia is mostly rice and fried vegetables, meat, tofu and tempeh. To be honest, I got bored with rice and noodles quite soon and was happy every time when I went to eat to western restaurant and could eat something else than rice. Eating out is really cheap even though western restaurants are more expensive and offers smaller portions than real Indonesian street kitchens where you can get dish and drink for about 1-2 euros. Even western restaurants are still much cheaper than in Finland. As it is so cheap to eat out and kitchen in our apartment wasn’t that convenient, I cooked only couple of times and after that always ate in restaurants. You should be careful in choosing the place where to eat: locals usually eat on the streets and they say there is the best food. However, my stomach couldn’t handle that and I got food poisoning every time afterwards. Food and restaurants are not as clean as we are used to have in Finland and thus I think you can’t avoid having food poisoning at some point. If you get sick during your semester, you should see a doctor at the hospital. I had to visit couple of times Rumah Sakit Boromerreus, which is hospital near the school. There are some doctors and some of them can speak English. I recommend taking a good travelling insurance as I heard that some hospitals don’t offer treatment for you if you don’t have insurance. As there are not that many tourists in some parts of the Indonesia, locals often came to take pictures with us. They call international people as “Bule”!and you can hear that word everywhere you go. People are pointing you and yelling BULE, and want to have a picture

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Spring 2014 k93558

with you, so you should get used to it that you are not able to walk alone on the street as you could do in Finland. Indonesians speak language called Bahasa Indonesia but it is often called only Bahasa. There are a lot of different languages in different parts of Indonesia but everyone should speak Bahasa. Basics of the language are easy to learn and knowing the language even a bit, makes your life easier if you can tell to the taxi driver where to go, call a taxi, bargain etc. I took a Bahasa class at university and it was useful: in the end I could have some discussions in Bahasa and I really enjoyed learning the language. ITB is relatively new with exchange students and you can see it. There are not many exchange students and this semester we were 3 from Finland, 4 from Germany, 4 from France, 2 from Denmark and 1 from Holland. This was actually nice as we got to know each other’s better and it felt like we were one big family. ITB is having all the time new partnership universities from different countries and I think that in the future there will be more exchange students and they are more prepared receiving exchange students.

Travelling As it is easy to arrange courses to the beginning of the week there is a lot of time for travelling. If you wish to see something more than only Bandung, and I strongly recommend you to do so as there is not much to do in Bandung, there are lot of travelling options in huge country of Indonesia. The best way to travel in Indonesia is with local people. If you are travelling only in tourist group, it is common that you are cheated in many situations. At least you should speak a little Indonesian in order to be able to bargain; otherwise you will pay way too much for everything. Here is a list of some of the places I visited during my exchange.

Pangandaran This was a very nice destination, about 6-7 hours away from Bandung by car. It is one of the closest beaches from Bandung and good place for surfing. It is not far away from green

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Spring 2014 k93558

Canyon, and I strongly recommend visiting there at the same time. There is also National Park at Pangandaran where you can see deer and crazy monkeys as well as beautiful white beach.

Bali Even though many of my Indonesian school friends told me that I shouldn’t go to Bali at all, as it is so touristic place, I think it was not that bad during the low season. Especially Seminyak beach is really beautiful and good for surfing. Kuta Beach is full of vendors and it might be difficult to relax there on your own. However, I liked that there were so many other “bule” there, so Indonesians were not that surprise to see a white person. In Bali you can find really good food and nice restaurants, beautiful beaches and cute hotels. There are also lots of surfing teachers in Bali and it is good place for surfing.

Nusa Lembongan I really recommend this place! It is cute Island next to Bali. It takes approximately couple of hours to travel there from the Denpassar airport (first 30 minutes by taxi to Sanur, and then about 45min-2h by boat to Nusa Lembongan depending which boat you choose). We rented scooters to discover different beaches of the island and it was really worth it. The island was small and quiet, perfect place for relaxation.

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Spring 2014 k93558

Lombok Lombok is one of my favorite places I visited in Indonesia. It was not as touristic as Bali and it was extremely beautiful place to visit. People were nice and helpful, and scenery was beautiful. We rented scooters here as well and drove around the island.

GIli islands There are three Gilis islands, called Trawangan, Air and Meno. We stayed at Gili Air, which is located closest to Lombok. We had heard that it is more peaceful than the most popular Gili Trawangan. We stayed four days there but I think one or two days would have enough. I recommend visiting also Gili Trawangan, which is known as a party island. We chose Gili Air because I had read that it is best of the Gili Islands for snorkeling: it is the place to meet big turtles while snorkeling. Unfortunately we suffered from terrible eye infection while staying there and were not able to snorkel at all.

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Spring 2014 k93558

Mount Merbabu

This was my first hiking trip ever, and I extremely recommend this place if you have opportunity to go there. The nature was incredible, and worth of hiking up 3142 meters. The sunrise from the mountain was one of the most beautiful ones I have ever seen. We rented all hiking equipment from hiking store in Bandung and it wasn’t that expensive. Local people told us ghost stories from the mountain, and even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I was a bit afraid before going there. It is part of Indonesian culture to believe in ghosts.

Yogyakarta We had a bit bad luck as we spent 3 days at Yogyakarta but after the first day there was volcano eruption about 200 kilometers away from Yogyakarta but because of the wind there was dust rain even in Yogyakarta at the next day. This pretty much ruined all of our plans, as there was actually nothing to do in the city: everything was closed and you had to wear breathing mask every time you went outside. We went to see the sunrise but couldn’t see anything due to this dust rain. In the end it was a unique experience and brought bottle of this volcanic dust with me to Finland. The city is well known for its huge temples. I visited Borobudur, the Buddhist temple, later on during the semester, and it was really nice place to visit.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

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Final words I have to admit that Bandung is not necessarily the easiest destination to go on exchange. Nevertheless, I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn new culture and get an experiment of a lifetime. I went to Indonesia to experience something new and I sure did. I got a lot of new friends, both locals and other exchange students. I also learned a lot of Indonesian culture and Muslim religion. Overall I feel that this experience was really eye opening for me. I feel that I was used to too good before going to Indonesia and I didn’t realize how differently things could be in somewhere else. Now I am more humble and I respect more people from different cultures. People in Indonesia are extremely nice and nature is breathtaking beautiful. The University is the best Business School in Indonesia and I liked that the school felt quite practical. There is lot of assignments to do during the semester, however those were not too difficult and there definitely is also free time to discover the culture and nature of beautiful Indonesia.

Exchange report

Spring 2014 k93558

Overall I have to say that I loved my experience in Indonesia and would go back any day if that would be possible. The beginning was difficult for me but after that the semester was amazing and I wouldn’t change anything. If you are going to Indonesia, I recommend taking it easy and not stressing too much, everything is going to be fixed by Indonesian way.

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