Exchange report The Australian National University 363734 & 362421 Fall 2015
Preparing for the exchange When we got accepted to the Australian National University, we soon received an e-mail, which had information about the documents that were required from the host university. The documents were: Overseas health cover insurance Language certificate Picture of passport Copy of the visa The overseas health cover insurance was acquired through the host university and it was quite straightforward, since all you had to do was pay the insurance directly to an account stated in the first e-mail sent by the host university. The language certificate had to be issued by a relevant teacher of the language center from our home university, which in our case was Michael Baker. Furthermore we had to send a scanned copy of our passports to the host university. The visa application was done online and the process itself was surprisingly easy with only one exception, which was the additional information needed regarding the compulsory military service. However, the additional information needed was only the official document from the Finnish defense forces accompanied by a short description of the duties during the service. After sending this additional document to the officials handling the visa, it took under 24 hours for the visa to be officially issued and accepted. After looking up for the most convenient ways to travel to Canberra, we decided to take a flight first to Sydney and then take a bus from Sydney airport, which was cheaper compared to flying, since direct flights to Canberra are quite rare and therefore expensive. The bus leaves from the domestic airport, which is about 45 minutes from the international airport by foot, but luckily there is a shuttle that takes you there in just about 10 minutes for only 5 dollars. The bus trip from Sydney to Canberra was provided by a company called Murrays, and the trip itself takes about 3,5 hours to arrive in Canberra. It is possible to ask someone to come to pick you up from the airport or the bus station if you want. If you need to book a hostel accommodation in Canberra before you receive your final accommodation, we can highly recommend Canberra City YHA, which is right in the center of the city and in a walking distance from the ANU. Exchange studies The school started on the 13 th of July with the orientation period and ended on the 21 st of November including the examination period. If you are lucky your exams might be already over at the beginning of the November but as it was in our case, we both had our last exam on the last examination day. We noticed that on the autumn period there were not that many business courses available, and that is why we had so many common courses. But it also of course depends on your interests and needs whether you can find a lot of useful courses or not. We were only allowed to take undergraduate courses that were provided by the ANU College of Business and Economics, and were thus not allowed to take for example the Australian culture course that we would have been very interested to take to become more familiar with the culture. Exchange students are allowed to pick up 6 courses from the available business courses and the school will based on your choices grant you access to at least 4 of them. In our case ANU approved all 5 of the the 6 course choices and we could then make the final decision about which 4 of them we wanted to take.
The courses were all offered only in English excluding language courses. All the courses included 1 lecture and 1 tutorial session per week. It was mandatory to go to both of the lectures and the tutorials. Tutorial sessions involve discussion about the topics that were talked in the lecture, and you often have to hand out your tutorial assignments in these sessions. If you miss a lecture, you can also check it afterwards as all the lectures are recorded. Courses BUSI2025 International business undergraduate, 6 units (7,5 ECTS) International Business was taught by Andrew Bradley, who gave us a broad understanding about the different international environments, in which companies are conducting business. You get to know about cultural differences between people but also a lot about international strategies and real life situations that companies face nowadays. The course included 2 case assignments, 1 Business environment analysis report and final exam. We also had to make weekly tutorial assignments and to be prepared to talk about the lecture topics in the tutorial sessions. The topics on themselves were not too hard, but there is a lot of content in the textbook, so you have to be prepared to read a lot. We both found the course very interesting and useful, as globalisation is growing it s importance so knowledge about other countries is always important. MGMT 3002 Tools and Techniques for Business Project Management - Undergraduate, 6 units (7,5 ECTS) This course was very interesting and practical. You will learn the basics of all the project phases, and I felt that I learned many things that I can utilize in my future career. The course introduces you to the most common techniques and tools that are used in different project phases and gives you the basic skills of Microsoft project program. The course includes one group assignment where you create a project with Microsoft Project, write a report about the project s details and present the project to the class. Also a literature review about some project management research area was required. The lecturer was Ying-Yi Chih, She was very strict and demanding both in class and in the assignments, but the teaching was also at a high level. BUSN3017 Corporate Social Responsibility, Accountability and Reporting - Undergraduate, 6 units (7,5 ECTS) This course provided us the basic theoretical knowledge about the CSR in the business environment and also real life examples and cases. This course proved out to be the most challenging of all the courses we took. The lecturer was Colleen Hayes, who was very strict in grading, which was quite surprising judging by the not so high quality teaching we received. The content of the course did not feel complicated or difficult, but for some reason we both felt that the requirements that the teacher gave us were often unclear and it was hard to know what the teacher expected from us. The course was graded based on the following assignments: Critical essay, 20-page business report and the final exam. We also had to make weekly tutorial assignments and to be prepared to talk about the lecture topics in the tutorial sessions.
MGMT2007 Organisational Behaviour Undergraduate, 6 units (7,5 ECTS) Organisational behaviour was the easiest course we took, but it still required quite a lot of work. Unfortunately the lecturer Tom Kalliath was not too enthusiastic which could be seen in the high absence of students taking part in the lectures. But the two exams and the literature review are easy to manage without going to the lectures. The content revolved around the different situations that organizations face in terms of using different behavior models to understand and improve organizational effectiveness. The course was graded based on our weekly tutorial assignments, literature review and the final exam sessions. MGMT3021 Leadership Undergraduate, 6 units (7,5 ECTS) The lecturer of this course is Dr. Richard Winter. The lecturer is quite enthusiastic about the course and clearly has a lot of knowledge, but there is a clear lack of real life experiences in leadership. The course itself was not too hard, but there is a case study every week, which is done within a group. The evaluation is based on the weekly case studies, one individual case study, and the exam. The exam has 9 essays, from which you can choose 5 for answering, which is very helpful, since you don t have to study the whole book in order to have a good grade. The lectures are somewhat useful because the weekly case studies are related to the same weeks lecture. Leadership was a course that I chose, because I thought that it would offer concrete learning in terms of organizational leadership, but it turned out that the whole course was almost 90 percent academic theories and assumptions. In addition the evaluation for case studies was quite different that we are used to in Finland, since quantity overcame quality in most cases. Free time and other information The cost of living in Australia does not differ too much from Finland. Books were quite expensive for the courses, therefore if possible we recommend buying a used version, since the new ones depending from the course can be over 100 dollars. Luckily not all the courses rely on having a book, and some of them are even available as e-books. Accommodation prices are quite high in Australia, even though we received our accommodation through ANU. We both lived in the davey lodge, which is a part of the Unilodge accommodation service, which is one of the available accommodation options for ANU students. The prices are relatively high, our rent being close to 500 euros a month, but there was internet, electricity and gas included to the rent. Unilodge apartments are clean and relatively modern, because they are all built in the 21 st century. Canberra itself is relatively small compared to Helsinki for example, but everything that you need can be found in the shopping center near the ANU. Everyone recommended of getting a bike, since Canberra is known for its good routes to travel with a bike, but anyway its not necessary because all the places are relatively close to each other and its perfectly possible to just walk to all the places you need in your everyday life. The bus is also a valid option for traveling, and frankly it was quite cheap with students receiving discounts. In addition for those who feel homesick, there is a brand new IKEA just 20 minutes away from the city center. The weather can be a bit surprise to those who are waiting for the stereotypical Australian heat. In the winter (June - September), having warm clothes is more than
recommended, since it can get close to 0 Celsius in the nighttime one day it was even snowing! Cultural differences are also not too drastic compared to Finland, but the general atmosphere is a bit friendlier and laidback, and one of the most used line from the people there was indeed no worries. You can notice the atmosphere both in the good and the bad, for instance the timetables are not as strict as in Finland, so if you are very accurate in terms of time, be prepared to relax a bit as Australians are not too serious if its 12:00 or 12:20 you were supposed to meet. Traveling in the host country Probably the most important reason why we chose to go to Australia for exchange was the great opportunity to travel to some of the most amazing and beautiful places on earth. Australia has a lot to offer, even so much that it is sometimes really hard to choose to which of the great places to go. Canberra might feel a bit small and even boring sometimes, so it is luckily very easy to take a bus to Sydney to spend there a long weekend and enjoy the feeling of a big city. The bus from Canberra to Sydney stops also on the Sydney Airport so it is easy to take a flight from there to anywhere to Australia. We ourselves went to Sydney together 4 times, and found it easy to take for example the morning bus to Sydney on Friday and the bus back to Canberra on Sunday evening. To Melbourne it possible to find cheap flights if you book the tickets early enough, but there is also a night bus leaving from Canberra that arrives in Melbourne early in the morning. Melbourne is definitely worth visiting, and if you rent a car you most certainly want to see the most amazing views of the Great ocean road. The longer trips are easiest to do before or after the school period. Even though there is a mid-semester break of two weeks in the middle of the period, be prepared that you might have to do assignments or read to mid-semester exams and cannot spend the whole time travelling. But when the school is over it is highly recommended to rent a car or take a bus (we took the Greyhound s hop-on-hop-off -tickets) and go to travelling and see the most beautiful beaches and coral reefs that Australia has to offer. We travelled all the way from Sydney to Cairns by buss, and can highly recommend that route and all the places we saw there including Byron Bay, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Noosa, Airlie Beach, Magnetic Island and Cairns.
Final Comments Yes we would recommend the university, but with one side-note. The University is placed very high in rankings both inside Australia and the world, because of its research based focus. While this all may look good in your resume and provide you with very good academic knowledge, keep in mind that the workload is heavier than in our home university. We both felt that the amount of work compared to studying in Aalto requires a lot more hours and dedication in order to receive good grades, since in addition to having exams, the courses had a variety of different high workload assignments accompanied with strict grading. If we were going to the same university for another exchange we would have definitely spent more time on researching the courses and the workload they involved, in other words chosen a lot easier courses. Even though all the courses give you the same amount of credits, the workloads differ a lot between different courses. Furthermore if we would have known that the international student activities board was quite inactive throughout our exchange, we would have tried to get to know more of the international students in the one and only event they organized at the beginning of the exchange. In addition for First off we learned a lot of English both in writing and in speaking as one would expect, but also a lot about interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. You hear a lot about the western cultures and their similarities, but even though Australia can be considered as a western culture, the students in the ANU consist of a lot of people from all around the world. For example, the ANU has particularly a lot of Asian students that are studying there full time, which helped us to not only get a good look on Australian culture, but also a mixture of Asian cultures as well. The choice of taking risks in life and choosing to do something out of your comfort zone can be sometimes very scary. Choosing to go literally to the other side of the world was a risk that was with no doubt very worth it. Australia is an amazing place, with its own unique culture, that we were lucky to be a part of. We met so many amazing people who will hopefully be our lifelong friends in the distant future as well. The whole experience widened our way of seeing life and will definitely be one of the most inspiring experiences of our lives. We learned that it is well worth it to leave Finland for a while and get a whole different lifestyle, but it is also amazing to come back as well. You will learn to appreciate Finland so much more when you see your life here from a distance. If you choose to go to Australia you most probably wont regret it. Australian people take care of that you will feel yourself welcome and what we learned, they are happy to take you as a part of their Sunday barbeques.