Residential College

I've been assigned to Morningside College!

I'm really happy about this because I requested Morningside as my residential college (on the college request form we all had to fill out). There were several reasons for this.

#1: Having only being completed in 2010, Morningside is the newest college. It has the newest facilities. It has the newest bathrooms. Enough said.
#2: The Master of the College is a Nobel laureate. It seems to be quite an academic college, and seeing as I'm there to study, this vibe should help keep me on the straight and narrow.
#3: One of the resident tutors is an ethnomusicologist. Enough said. (OK, maybe not enough said, but in my experience ethnomusicologists are never boring. Tal Kravitz's guest lecture at my university last year was brilliant and brilliantly funny. e.g. when an audience member tried to play the theramin, he comments "Its like making love to Shostakovich"). The other resident tutors seem really cool too.
#4: The college insists on mandatory participation in three communal dinners per week. Now this might sound like a drawback but I think it is a bonus. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights (school nights) I don't have to think about cooking, and I have recently found out that there are vegetarian options available for every meal. I also like the chance of having a meal with someone you might not otherwise talk to, and no doubt there will be no shortage of interesting dinner conversation!

I am yet to find many pictures of the dorms at Morningside, seeing as most of the blogs of the international students I have found were living in the I-House.

and #5: I don't have to walk up these stairs every moring, as Morningside is closer to the main campus.

Money

Scholarship money received!!!
That's all.

How To Complete The Documents For A Semester-Long Exchange Program IN TWO DAYS

The dreaded checklist.

I had five working days to get all these forms returned to HK. Australia Post Express Courier International Prepaid envelopes take 2-4 working days to arrive, and you can track the progress of your mail. It only took 2 days for my forms to arrive in HK, and the envelope cost a little over $40. This page has more info about Express Courier International products. Hopefully the notes below will help other students prepare their CUHK documents in the day or two you have before they must be sent!

Note #1
For Australian readers, the photo required for your Hong Kong Student Visa IS A DIFFERENT SIZE to our regular passport size photos. Unless you want to risk your visa being delayed (not good when it is less than four weeks from your start date and you have been advised that a visa takes 6-8 weeks to process) then go to a photographer. In Adelaide, the lovely people at Camera House in the Central Markets know what they are doing. (Did you know that for an Indian Visa/passport they require a 5cm x 5cm square photo? The people at Camera House did!)

Note #2
The Health History form. Ugh. I was not comfortable with some of the questions (specifically ones asking about my menstruation cycle! Just... ew) so the people at Adelaide Abroad asked CUHK if it was OK to not answer some of the questions. CUHK replied that the information on the form was only for the physicians at the University Health Services. I am yet to go to a doctor's surgery for the first time and NOT be made to fill in a medical form on the spot, so for me, I feel more comfortable disclosing things on the day rather than have them on file.

Note #3
Payment. Point 6 of the form declares:

Check with your bank and open a foreign currency (Hong Kong Dollar) bank account that can be linked with your credit card payment, if necessary.

This is NOT necessary for pretty much all Australian credit cards/Visa Debit/Mastercard Debit. Normally your bank just changes you a small conversion fee (normally a percentage of the total transaction e.g. 4%) when you pay for goods in a foreign currency. If unsure, just go in to a branch and check with them.

Good luck to all future CUHK IASP exchange students! After this process I think we should all be recognised with a bachelors degree in paperwork. Yes?

Timeline - Application to Acceptance

So, these next few posts might be extremely boring and extremely informative at the same time. This IS what happened during the application process for studying on exchange at CUHK for (their) Term 2, 2013. Happy reading!

So, I submitted the online application for the International Asian Studies Program (IASP) - essentially the fancy name of their undergrad exchange program - on September 4th 2012. Then... nothing. Really. I received nothing from the Office of Academic Links (OAL -  in charge of undergrad, postgrad, summer school etc exchange and study abroad students) for the entire month of September. However, on Spetember 14 I did receive notification that the University of Adelaide had applied for an International Student Exchange Scholarship on my behalf - worth $5000. Of course, payment of this scholarship was contingent on my being accepted by CUHK. (I would attach a link to the scholarship info, but the government department that was in charge of the scholarship - DEEWR - is now not in charge of it anymore. Good work guys! But the money has been confirmed. (*Angry Face* I'll believe it when I see the money in my account...)

And then, it was time to play the waiting game.

Below is what happened in October and November.

9th October - Was teased by the good people at OAL. 

I was sent an email asking that IF my application was successful, would I be living on campus, or would I be finding my own accomodation? The email went on to say that IF I intended to live on campus, then DO NOT REPLY TO THE EMAIL. However, IF my application was successful and IF I wanted to live off-campus (which was advised against unless you had an arrangement with family or friends) to then please reply by the 21st of October with details of where you intend to stay.
So basically I was asked to actively ignore the only contact I had had with my prospective exchange university. It was frustrating, to say the least.

12th November - ACCEPTANCE LETTER RECEIVED! Oh Happy Day.

But wait, there's more! In the email there were instructions about what to do next, namely, fill in visa forms, dorm preferences, permission forms if you are under 21 etc. Fair enough. A handy checklist with all these items and more was attached to the email. And then...
You are required to complete and return all the documents to our Office by courier before November 19, 2012.

Um, what?

There were approximately 40 pages of documents to fill in.

And I had 5 working days to get it to them.

Suffice to say, it happened. But not without lots of stress. 

Look forward to my next post: "How To Complete The Documents For A Semester-Long Exchange Program IN TWO DAYS". Hopefully next year's participants will then know what to expect and might be able to prepare a little in advance. Or at least will be aware that CUHK may want the documents returned to them essentially within a week of notification of acceptance.

Moral of the story. Once you have applied for exchange, check your email regularly. You might not have much time to do what they ask you to do. They say jump...

Introductions

So, I'm Sophie, I'm 24, and as of January 2013 I'm going to spend a semester studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I only found out about my acceptance yesterday (Grrrr), and though it is not official yet, I figured I'd start this blog anyway to at least record the timeline of the application process (that will be the next post).
This blog is for family, friends and future exchange students wanting to know more about CUHK. I have found blogs about a post-grad student's time at CUHK, and a few posts about a Danish girl who went there as part of GLOBE, and a few videos on YouTube about the dorms, but there is nothing really comprehensive. So that's what I want this blog to be:

Sophie's Comprehensive English Guide To Studying And Living At The Chinese University of Hong Kong As An Undergraduate For One Semester.

There's probably a million blogs in Chinese about CUHK, but I can't really read Chinese... yet!

Why CUHK?

Because their Linguistics and Modern Languages Department is AMAZING.

Next year I will (hopefully) graduate from a Bachelor of Languages degree from the University of Adelaide, and then go on to post-graduate study, and then make a career for myself in academia. However, my university does not have a particularly robust Linguistics department e.g. we have one course called 'Morphology and Syntax' taught over a 12-week semester. CUHK has FOUR semester-long subjects of M&S, so their students obviously get more than just the 'quick and dirty' version we have to whip through at uni. CUHK offers a range of undergrad linguistics courses that are simply not available in most universities in Australia until post-grad level, so I think I have made a good decision on a good university in that respect. Also, I have been studying Japanese for two years now, and in December I will be taking JLPT Level 4. I studied Mandarin up until high school (but in Australia that doesn't necessarily mean we actually learned anything) and I have been studying Korean on my own for about a year. So now... let's study Cantonese and traditional characters! Wooooo! I am actually really excited about this - I am yet to meet a language I don't like. Of course, languages are difficult, but they are also beautiful and rich and diverse, and seeing as they will be my bread and butter in the future, for me, it is a rewarding investment.

Anyway, I'll be taking six courses over the semester: four linguistics courses, and two more just for fun!

More to follow soon.

~ Sophie