Life as Exchange Students in Taylor's University

By: Corrine Jucker and Nina Wüst

We are extremely happy to have the opportunity to be here in Taylor's University as exchange students for one semester. We like it so much here that we would like to extend our stay. 

This exchange program is a great experience for us and comparing Taylor's to our home university, the HTW Chur; everything here is big. The HTW Chur located in Chur, which is the oldest city of Switzerland is rather a small university with around 1,600 students.

Even though that almost everything works differently here than at home, we do not have any problems in adapting ourselves. The only thing that we will probably not be able to get used to is all the rules and regulations that we have to adhere in the U Residence, we find it really strict. 

On class that we're attending, it is interesting to see how the lectures here are all organized and well designed. Furthermore, we are excited that we got to learn on other subjects that we did not study back home. Especially this subject, Tour and Travel Operations Management. This is because of its' practical part. It is highly interesting to learn on organizing a tour for a big group of students. It makes us realize how much work it has to take and on which aspect has to be paid attention on. Every part of it is very important.

During the group assessments, we also realized that we could learn a lot. And by working together with our classmates, we have also realized that they have different approaches of accomplishing the task compared to Swiss students. We got to learn some helpful tricks from our classmates and we wish to teach them to our classmates back home and hopefully, we could also bring in some ideas on how to work efficiently together.

And on this upcoming Sri Lanka trip, of course we are looking forward for the tour! Not just for the reason that Sri Lanka is a beautiful country to discover, but to also get to know our class better and to spend a good time together. 

One of the reasons that we favored Kuala Lumpur to do our exchange semester is to learn about a completely different culture or even more than one: Kuala Lumpur and especially Taylor's as an international university is a real melting pot. And for that reason, we get to know people, both locals and international students, whom are of different nationalities and cultures, which is really wonderful!

But still, we would like to know more on locals, or Asians in general. As in, do they behave differently here? How does the lifestyle of the ones in our age look like? What is their stance over different things? And so, we sincerely are hoping to get a deeper insight of the Asian culture during our international study tour. Besides that, we are naturally excited to go visit Sri Lanka with all its historical sightseeing points, the impressive scenery and of course the well-known beautiful beaches...