Conclusion for the 14-week Program on Study Abroad

Welcome back! This is the last post of the 14-week long study for various ways that a student can make his or her own way to enjoy an overseas studying experience. Like what I mentioned at the very beginning, the reason why I chose this topic is that I was actually making the same study plan for myself. For a slow-thinker and a slow-learner like me, it's fascinating to have such a chance to look up for comprehensive information and plan every single details through the whole semester. The flowchart below elaborate how the whole process was about.

 

    From the flowchart above, we can clearly see that under the assumption of  "I want to study and travel at the same time", I chose two possible options to achieve the goal. One is apply for overseas universities or colleges and the other is apply for non-credit-granting programs that provide overseas experiences. After that I spent several weeks doing research about the top universities in English speaking countries based on the "QS World University Rankings 2013", and the research has yielded up some surprising results which is two schools that I've never considered before. However, after comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the two top universities in downtown London, the tuition fee and living costs are fantastically expensive that I can only gave up the plan and look for alternatives.

    Luckily, I did found a better way to send myself and people like me abroad via a economic way, which is the exchange programs for three reasons: First of all, the cost is way lower. In most cases, students only have to pay their own school's fee and nothing else. Secondly, exchange programs provide credits transfer that is crucial for a student's graduation. Last but not least, exchange programs provide just exactly the same experience as studying abroad. Students live and study on the campus, enjoy being the member of the school for that period of time...etc. These are what a summer / winter camp and volunteering cannot offer.

    In sum, if you're also planing a overseas study or travel plan and don't know where to start, hopefully the information I collected and organized here might help you to make the right choice. Good luck!

Alternatives: Summer / Winter Camp & Volunteering

In addition to exchange programs, which we talked about last week, this week let's take a look at some other ways that might also provide the same overseas experience.

    The first alternative I'm sharing to you is the summer or winter camp offered by prestigious colleges or universities. Attendants of these camps will have a chance to live on the campus of their school of dreams, moreover, they will take short-term courses which is specially designed for students to know more about the country's culture, language or history in a efficient way. However, summer or winter camps are expensive in comparison to those methods I mentioned the week before last week. For example, the summer camp to UCB costs at least 200 thousand NTD for a 6-week standard course. For those who only want to slightly experience cultural shock and are extremely well-off, summer / winter camps are options that you should not miss.

The second alternative that actually I recommended more for normal students is volunteering. This number of volunteering programs are increasing outrageously these days. Volunteering programs even have been categorized into several types, some offer free plane tickets, some cover volunteers' living costs, some even provide international certification or credits to their crews. Among all of these countless organizations world wide I strongly recommend AIESEC, an international not-for-profit and the world's largest student-run organization. They have plenty of almost every resource from every part of the world, therefore, you can find volunteering programs to any destination you can ever think of. Most of these Global Community Development Programs (GCDP) take place in summer or winter vacation, students who are interested in should remember to attend their interviews to have a seat in their volunteering programs. Good luck and enjoy!

Alternatives: Exchange Programs

Among these various ways of going abroad economically, most of the exchange programs allow their applicants to pay their own school's tuition fee only and offers credit-transfer services. Therefore it's probably the most economic and accessible way for a student to visit a school in a foreign country. Let's take NCCU students for an example and see where and how can they go abroad within their college years.

First of all, it will be a lot more easier to pick from the current NCCU school partners list or applicants might don't know where to start from. According to the office of international cooperation in NCCU, the school has a great number of partner universities across five continents. For students who would like to use English as the spoken language while they study and travel, universities that located in North America should be their top choices. NCCU currently has 58 partner universities in North America, the schools are scattered in both Canada and the United State. Here are some world famous schools that are listed in our partnership list in North America: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),   University of California, Berkeley (UCB), University of Wisconsin-Madison, just to name a few. The term of these programs depends on each partnership contract, which will last among one to two semester. Some universities also provides summer school for a people who want to experience the way of local living in a short period of time, however, these summer schools won't be as economical as the exchange program I recommended this week. The rest of the information about when is the time for application for admission and all the things about the school will be posted on the school's website, thus make sure to visit the school's website frequently if you're interested in the programs they offer.

In sum, what an exchange program provides is almost the same as that of a 2-year foreign study plan if yuo are well prepared and open minded. Do a little study about the school that you would like to go, send out your application form and enjoy!

Alternatives for Your Overseas Experience

Welcome back!
    According to our last week's conclusion, it seems that to students who do not have abundant fund, the plan of studying abroad could hardly come true. However, we don't have to be so pessimistic and lose all our faith in pursuit of a better life,there are still some alternatives to reach the same goal. For example, colleges and universities are now offering world wide exchange programs, summer/winter camps, volunteering, internships and approved programs that fit all kinds of demands. The rest of the weeks we will be focusing on each of the alternatives, figure out what is it and how to use it to reach our goal economically.
    First of all, these various programs can be roughly divided into two groups, credit-granting or purely experiential. Exchange programs, approved programs and summer/winter (most schools limited the maximum numbers of transferable credits) can be categorized into the former group; whereas volunteering, internships are basically purely experiential.

    Second, the reason why I strongly recommend these alternatives is because they can really cut down a huge amount of costs comparing to your original study plan. For example, exchange programs only cost you your own school's tuition fee while you're actually going to some other schools that has a higher tuition cost; volunteering programs are mostly free and they probably also cover your local living costs, internships programs might costs you plane tickets but you can probably earn more than that after the program ends.
    In short, if you're still hoping for a life-changing overseas experience, make sure to look up for information about the programs mentioned above.

Compare and Contrast: The Top 2 Universities in London.

Point of Comparison	Imperial College London	University College London	Same or Different?
Location	-          Main campus: South Kensington, West London.	-          Main campus: Bloomsbury, Central London.	Same
Academic Strengths	-          Science -          Engineering -          Medical research.	-          Art & humanities -          Life science & Medicine -          Social Science & Management	Different
Student Mix	-          63% male -          31% from outside EU	-          46% male -          41% from outside UK	Different
Application to admission ratio	-          6.5:1	-          8.4:1	Different
Maximum tuition fee (Overseas Post-grad, classroom.)	-          GBP 17,000	-          GBP 16,250	Same

source:
1. http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/university-college-london/
2. http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/imperial-college-london/
3. http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing-university/ucl-or-imperial

After we've spent couple weeks on learning about the details of the top 3 universities we can find in central London, this week is the time to do some final combat or comparison of the 2 colleges and to conclude. Before we started to do compare and contrast studies, it might be helpful is you read the following paragraphs with the table listed at the top.

First of all, the main campus of University College London located in Bloomsbury, Central London; likewise, the main campus of Imperial College London which located in Kensington is in the center of London. For students who is desperate for exciting cultural experiences of the city, both UCL and ICL can definitely fulfill your needs. As for the tuition fee, UCL overseas post-graduate students, just like those who attend Imperial College London, have to pay approximately 17,000 Britain Pounds for two semesters of full-time enrollment.
Despite all these similarities, the two top central London universities still has quite a lot differences. Unlike Imperial College London who pays particular regard to science, engineering and medical research fields, University College London has the world's top institutions of the art & humanity field of study. Apparently UCL is probably the more appropriate institution for students who graduated from NCCU, since we mainly majored in social science and management fields. From a overseas students aspect, the students who consist the school is equally important to the school itself. Imperial College London is mainly consists of male students; in contrast, UCL is mainly consists of female students. Moreover, UCL has more international students than ICL, which might indicates that students will has a lager chance to use their own languages in UCL. The last but not the least, the application to admission ratio of UCL is relatively low compared with that of Imperial College London. While the two universities have extremely strict entrance standard, applicants who are looking forward to be prospective students of UCL have to pay even more attention to the materials they submit and their grades at their previous schools.

King's College London

According to the 2012/13 QS international world rankings, King's College London is one of the top 30 universities in the world and the fourth oldest in England. King's has a particularly distinguished reputation in the humanities, law, the sciences (including a wide range of health areas such as psychiatry, medicine, nursing and dentistry) and social sciences including international affairs. It might be a bad news to some NCCU students that King's College London doesn't offer further education of business or finance, whereas the other students who major in law or public policy related departments will find KCL would think it appealing. The prestigious law school of King's just received a personal donation of  £20 million from a well-known Hong Kong based philanthropist Dickson Poon in 2012, which implies the school of law could offer much more resources then it ever was.

The main campus of King's College London locates near to that of University College London and to most of the tourist attractions in London, the London eye, Big Ben, the river Thames, the Waterloo bridge...etc. The school itself even use "Study Abroad at King's, in the Heart of London " as the slogan on the overseas students landing page on their official website.

As for the tuition fee of King's, however, is not as expensive as a King should pay. Overseas full time postgraduate research degree programmes costs applicants approximately £16,000 each year, which is a little cheaper than that of University College London and a little more than that of Imperial College London.

If you are a humanities, law, science, psychiatry, medicine, nursing, dentistry, social sciences or international affairs major student, then you'd better put King's College London into your option list.

Imperial College London

Imperial College London was established in 1907, it celebrate its 100 years birthday and became independent from UCL in 2007. Today, Imperial focus mostly on scientific, engineering and medical research, but also has a well-known business school, the Imperial College Business School. Therefore, students who have interest in these areas can take Imperial in to their consideration. The students of Imperial consists of 36% females and 28% are from outside of European Union, the two proportions are much lower than that of UCL, which we might expect a better English study environment with more males and more English speakers.

With 9 campuses in and around London, the main campus of Imperial is in South Kensington, in central London. It's a place where you find yourself surrounded by cultural centers for the arts, sciences and music. Imperial's neighbours include the Royal Albert Hall, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The nearest underground station, the South Kensington station, is only 10 minutes far by walking.

Apart from these basic info, the critical factor that decides whether or not to apply for this college is sure to be the tuition fee. According to "the complete university guide" website, the annual tuition fees that an overseas post-graduate student is expected to pay is around £15,350–17,000, which is approximately $25,911-$28,700 US dollars and $783,400-$867,600 NT dollars.

While marketing have become the most popular choice for Taiwanese students who have a desire to study abroad, Imperial College London offers notable commerce educations, lower tuition fees than that of UCL and also locates in central London is another considerable option for them.

University College London(UCL)

    After we've conducted the cross-reference study between the location of the best college in the UK and the famous tourist attractions last week, we're going to take a closer look at these three college located in London:
1.University College London
2.Imperial College London
3.King's College London
    Most of the information provided here are based on what I found on the two website, "the complete university guide" and "QS World University Rankings". If you're a international student, I highly recommend you to browse thoroughly the former website in your leisure time. The complete university guide provides extremely details about the school itself and some other extra but essential information about the area around the campus that a student would need; for example, info about student house hunting, crime hot spot near campus, the average living cost survey, etc. Most importantly, they offer totally free access to the website.

University College London

    UCL is founded in 1826, which makes it the 3rd oldest university in the UK. Situated in the heart of London, UCL is very near to the world's most important collections, including the British Library and the British Museum. Alongside world-leading departments across all of the arts and sciences, UCL also boasts a top-rated architecture school, and one of the UK’s best art schools, the Slade School of Art.  At undergraduate level, international students at UCL can expect to pay £14,750-19,500 per-year for most subjects (roughly US$22,500-30,000).

    Even though UCL could be the best choice for any student who wants to pursue a high academic achievement, I don't think UCL will be the right place for NCCU graduates. First of all, the subject strength of UCL is manly in the field of At and science, which are exactly the weakness of NCCU. If you want to find a top university that offer a leading management or business school, the Imperial College London would be a better choice for you. Secondly, the annual tuition fee is outrageously high for international students. This is a common phenomenon that happens in higher educations in UK or USA, however, compared to that of the local students', international students should be well-prepared to pay for their doubled tuition fee. Apart from these seemingly disadvantages, the location situation of UCL is a clear victory, students who are abundant of money will never regret their choice of UCL.

Cross Reference the Locations of Colleges with Tourist Attractions in UK and Europe

Referring to our outcome last week, now we are certain that London has the most convenience transport systems among the top four locations, which travelers should care most. However, we cannot conclude that London will be the best choice for "backpackholics" simply because the city surpass the others on one part. This week, by doing some cross reference research by overlapping the locations of the most recommended tourist attractions in UK with the location of London, the results might provide sufficient evidence to conclude that London is the right choice. The table below lists the top 10 must-go tourist attractions in the UK based on several tour-guide sites, www.squidoo.com, www.visitlondon.com and www.touropia.com.

Rank	Spot	Location
1	Stonehenge (a prehistoric stone circle)	Wiltshire
2	Tower Bridge	London
3	The British Museum	London
4	York Minster	Deangate, York
5	Tower of London	London
6	Big Ben	London
7	Palace of Westminster	London
8	Buckingham Palace	London
9	The London Eye	London
10	St. Paul's Cathedral	London

The result showed here might not be so surprising that tourists can fill their travel schedule full only by wandering around the city of London. Moreover, these top ranked spots are located closely to each other, and the London Underground has stations that transport backpackers to each of them in an convenience and economic way. If you have enough of the Great Britain's heritage and culture, you might want to expand your expedition to the whole Europe, then it will be perfect if you are fortunate enough to live in a city that has several international airports. Before that, let's take a look at another table that indicates the top 10 European travel destinations for 2013 based on an article written by Andy Murdock on Lonely Planet.

Rank	Spot	Location
1	Porto & Douro Valley	Portugal
2	Budapest	Hungary
3	Northern Iceland	Iceland
4	Cinque Terre	Italy
5	Moravia	Czech Republic
6	Bern	Switzerland
7	Marseille	France
8	Croatia	Croatia
9	Northern Ireland	Ireland
10	Copenhagen	Denmark

Apparently, it won't be a problem to book any ticket to go to these places from any international airport from London. Hopefully, this week's article do provide some more evidence to persuade you that choosing London as a base for backpacking and pursuit academic achievement will be a choice you won't regret.

The Location Challenge.

    Referring back to last week, we've went through a couple of simple steps and already chosen 8 universities which rank within top 10 out of total 800 schools on the QS World University Rankings list. This week I'll show you even more details about these schools to offer more references which might greatly help while making choices. Before we start, I decided to cross out the two Swiss Universities due to the language problem. French and German was the official language in Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, respectfully. The purpose of the study trip do not include learning or improving European language proficiency, furthermore, it could be a serious problem if students went to those schools without taking any local language lessons in advance. By doing so, now we have only 6 options on our list, and ALL of them are located in English speaking country,  the United Kingdom. Allow me to remind you again what we have here in the list below.

Rank	University	Location of Main Campus
3	University of Cambridge	Cambridge, UK
4	University College London	London, UK
5	Imperial College London	London, UK
6	University of Oxford	Oxford, UK
17	University of Edinburgh	Edinburgh, UK
19	King's College London	London, UK

    Apparently, these schools are mostly at the same level, any admission letter from these schools could literally bring you on the top of the world. Therefore, we will come back later to discuss about the featuring departments of each . Let's first focus on the locations and do some analysis. From the list above, we have 4 different locations of main campus to decide, which are Cambridge, London, Oxford and Edinburgh. 

Transport	London	Cambridge	Oxford	Edinburgh
Airports	6	1 (Cambridge Airport)	1 (London Oxford Airport)	1 (Edinburgh Airport)
Bus Routes	More than 700	the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway	- 280 - 5 park and ride sites with bus links. - Oxford to London coach route.	Lothian Buses
Metro system	The London Underground, serves 270 stations.	N/A	N/A	Edinburgh Trams(scheduled to open by May 2014)
Railway Stations	- London Waterloo station. - The Euro Star.	Cambridge railway station.	Oxford railway station.	Waverley Station.
Source: Wikipedia

It's totally not surprising that the capital city London won this round while comparing with the other 3 components on the topic of transport convenience. With the charts above, hopefully you can make your own decision within 15 minutes! See you next week.

The Top 10 Universities on the QS World University Rankings 2013

    This week we are moving on to the next topic which is the pros and cons of the top universities based on the QS World University Rankings 2013.
    According to the list below, if you have the passion for these world top universities, which mostly located in US and UK, the place you are going is definitely English speaking countries. The best Asian region university you can find on the ranking list within top 30 are National University of Singapore (NUS), and University of Hong Kong. Therefore, it's time to face the urgent need of better English skills unless you want to stay and travel in Asia only. Frankly speaking, from an Asian's aspect, we've read so many materials about European history whereas we only learn the American ways from modern movies and pop cultures, the preferred place to travel will be first Europe then North America. Thus, we have University of Cambridge (#3), University College London (#4), Imperial College London (#5), University of Oxford (#6),  ETH Zurich (#12), University of Edinburgh (#17), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (#19), King's College London (#19) on our option list below.

Rank	University	Location of Main Campus
3	University of Cambridge	Cambridge, UK
4	University College London	London, UK
5	Imperial College London	London, UK
6	University of Oxford	Oxford, UK
12	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology	Zürich, Switzerland
17	University of Edinburgh	Edinburgh, UK
19	Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Lausanne, Switzerland
19	King's College London	London, UK

    According to the list, these top 20 Europe Universities located in either the United Kingdom or Switzerland; luckily, English is available in both countries. Still, if you can learn German or French before you go to study in Switzerland, it will be a huge plus. The location mentioned above are mostly large cities in that country, any choice from these schools might provide you the most convenient life and transportation systems. For example, London is the capital city of UK, Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, and Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland while Lausanne ranked fourth in the same country. However, Cambridge and Oxford are university towns located in non-metropolitan district, which means the transport system might not be as convenient as that of those capital cities. Surprisingly, Oxford is served by the nearby Oxford airport within 15 minutes driving, therefore I will recommend college towns like Oxford more than those more like Cambridge.
    This week we've chose 8 out of 800 top universities from the QS World University Rankings, next week we'll go even further to take a closer look on the pros and cons of these universities. Thanks for reading! 

Tips for Choosing Your Ideal College / Univeristy

Last week I've shared my personal aspect of studying abroad, which is to have a chance to travel around the country and try to know more about their cultural  for a longer period of time. This week, after we've all agree on my reason of going abroad, it's time for us to pick the place we want to go and which college / university's student we want to be. Most of the colleges and universities around the world today have their own official website, it should be easy for anyone to find the basic information and admission information of the school. However, if you have suffered from online-phishing and lost all of your trust on online information, overseas education exhibitions are hosted almost every month at the Taipei exhibition center, these free admission exhibitions are another resource to get information from. While you're looking for schools to apply, the following key points should be taken under careful consideration in order to find your ideal school. First of all, consider the location. Since the main reason for studying abroad here is to enjoy backpacking with your school mates, it's unwise to choose a school which located in a college town in the middle of nowhere and is far from any available public transformation system.(e.g. metro system or international airport.) Second, consider the school's reputation. Most of the overseas students from Taiwan will go back to their homeland after they achieve their diploma, and it's possible that they have to use the diploma to seek for job opportunities. If the school you attended was not well-known by people, (At least it should be something that can be easily found on the internet) you'll still be less competitive when applying for occupations while you're actually more competitive then others. Last of all, consider the school's cost. Typically, the annual tuition fee of prestigious private college and university in the US costs about 20 to 40 times more of our tuition fee in Taiwan. A trade-off has to be made between applying for well-known colleges or for cheap community colleges, which depends on how much money you and your family can afford. Once again, it's unwise to put all your live savings in such investment while the main purpose of going abroad is to travel. In conclusion, applicants should be realistic while facing so many options. The tips and key points provided here may help you think twice before making a right decision.

Why study abroad?

Hi, thanks for stopping by!
Do you have any plans or interest in studying abroad? If the answer is yes, then you've come to the right place! I'm also a person who have already set a goal to study abroad within 2 to 3 years after graduation and military service. Therefore, in this blog I'm going to rearrange the information that I can find in a more organized way. (Probably some chart of comparative studies.) In each week, I will offer some topics that have something to do with studying abroad, including the latest news or university /college brief introductions . Feedback and  further discussion is very welcome. Today, before everything started, shouldn't we calm down a little bit and rethink why should we study abroad?
The most common reason for studying abroad might include, learning foreign languages, making friends from all over the world, enjoying a long holiday...etc. As for me, the critical factor that keeps pushing me is the possibility of having a long-term of time for traveling. My former experience in Shanghai Fudan University told me, only students have just enough time to travel around the country. Staying at the dormitory is by far the most economic choice as making it your travel base. But you might question me, is having fun that important? What about your studies? In my belief, traveling is not only about having fun. And the "travel" I mentioned here is more like backpacking, not luxury tours. Moreover, if the university or college I'm attending in my hometown is good enough, the courses taught there have absolutely the same quality as they have in foreign university and college. Whether I can learn something or not is always depend on the learning side not the teaching side. Therefore, the must-dos before I'm too old is to travel as far as I could, and meet as many people as  I could, only by doing so could I know how the world really looks like.
In short, for a backpack-holic like me, the main purpose of studying abroad is to have the chance to travel around the place rather than staying on the campus.
Next week, I will start to show you some of the information I collected and introduce them briefly, hopefully you will find some of them are worth reading.
Thanks again for reading to the end! Have a good day!

Free writing - Unexpected

By Kenneth Wang

    Even the simplest day might still contains some surprises deeply inside, only see if we can stop for a while and take a closer look. Take today for an example, I always planned want should be done and write them all on the list days before, and I noticed that today was just another day filled with part-time work and couple of courses, nothing to expect. After I finished my part time work and step out the computer center with such a low mood, a group of people wearing hilarious animal costumes hop towards me and asked me if I would like to take a photo with them. Being surprised, even though I still had a lot of things on my to-do list and I don't really know what they wants from me, I said yes and took the photo with them without any hesitation. After that, they told me if I upload that photo to the Facebook fan page of this campaign, I can get a coupon for a free fried chicken pie! What a surprise! For a person who loves fried chicken pie so much, this really made my day. In fact, the story don't end here. After the cute costume people left, I received a phone call from my friend and he asked me to join their party at a sport pub this weekend. The pub was the one that I always wanted to go, moreover, now I don't have to arrange anything more for weekends! In short, these unexpected incidents only happened when I stop for a while. If I didn't stop to take a photo, I might miss the chance to receive a free chicken pie and my friend's call, which might furthermore lead to a boring weekend. With this awesome experience, I might started to slower my pace and look for some great perhaps.