Stephanie WHITTON

Student of University of Tasmania, Australia
Exchange to Kanagawa University, Japan

I think perhaps one of the most important things when going in to any form of exchange study is to not have too many rigid expectations. By this I mean that while there will obviously be some things that you expect to happen or experience, both in academic and cultural or social life, you have to be open to the fact that there will be things that come as a surprise or that you perhaps find hard to deal with. I also found that you shouldn't be too worried about appearing ignorant, since no matter what there will be times when you aren't used to the situation at hand or might have to ask a question where the answer is obvious to other people. This is something that you shouldn't be afraid of, because if a person doesn't occasionally ask questions or do something where someone else has to correct them, it makes it harder to learn from your experiences, and learning from your experiences is the main purpose of exchange study.

For me, being able to live in Japan for almost half a year and study in a university there was a great opportunity, and to be honest I wished I had stayed longer. It was a great experience both academically and socially. While I was there I studied Japanese along side the other exchange students who came from various universities around the world, and was even able to participate in some of the regular university classes with the Japanese students, such as Chinese and even a cross cultural studies class. I think that taking the time to interact and make friends with not only the regular students, but also the other exchange students is a great way to learn even a small amount about other cultures, and it might even help you gain an interest in something you perhaps didn't really give much thought to when choosing the place of your exchange.

I feel that I benefited from my exchange study academically as well. It was very interesting to study at a foreign university and to see how different it was to my home university, but it was also interesting to see in what ways life at university was the same, despite the cultural differences. And, of course, I was incredibly happy to be able to study Japanese while actually residing in Japan, which in my opinion is probably the best way to learn a language. Being able to learn the language, immediately put it into practice in day-to-day life, and notice improvements in my ability as the months go by, no matter how subtle, was for me one of the best parts of my exchange.

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