Preparations

As I sit here at Schiphol in the early morning, waiting for my first flight of the day to arrive, I feel it’s a perfect time to write my first blog. In this blog I’ll go into my preparations and application, and the issues which arose during the months before my departure.

Preparations have not gone as smoothly as one might hope it would go with professional institutes, but I guess bureaucracy exists in any culture. Once I found out I was allowed to go to Seoul on exchange for my third year of International Business Administration, I started looking into the procedure to enroll at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in Seoul. I applied quite early, but they did not do anything with the application until somewhere in May, slowing my progress by a bit. That in itself was not a problem, since there wasn’t anything else I could really do to prepare at that time. They then sent a package with all sorts of documents (official acceptance, information booklet, etc.) through regular mail which arrived a while later.

From then on I could start applying for my visum and book my flights, so I went to The Hague to go to the relatively tiny Korean embassy. After a week my visum was ready and I traveled back to the embassy to pick it up, only to find out that the gate was closed and no one replied to the doorbell. I was lucky that someone who worked there arrived a little bit later and was able to open the gate for me, since no one was occupying the reception even though the embassy was open. I decided to outsource my entire travel plan to Kilroy Travels, since I am very inexperienced with travelling; I have never flown alone, left the continent or even travelled alone before. Furthermore, I haven’t been on vacation in years.

Having received my visum and booked my flight tickets, I started looking into courses I could follow and had to send those in for approval from my home university, Tilburg University. Eventually I had eleven approved courses for which I could try to enroll online at SKKU so I waited for the online course enrollment to open. However, the day it was supposed to open, it turned out the English version of the registration did not work. After a couple of days, it finally worked (albeit only in Internet Explorer) and I tried to register for my preferred courses. By then, however, the courses were already full or unavailable, which was probably due to the fact that Korean students have had the ability to enroll for courses for several days by then. In the following weeks, the system stopped working again and I gave up on it as did several other exchange students. I think none of the exchange students were able to register through the online portal. My situation at the moment is the following; I have one registered course because I contacted the professors directly and still need to enroll in two or three more once I arrive in Korea through a form which needs to be signed by the other professors.

I’m sure everything will turn out to be fine, since they’ve been doing it in this way for years and years and apparently it’s never gone astray. I just wish everything could’ve gone a bit quicker and smoother. Could’ve saved me some time, effort and worries. I guess there’s only one way to find out; taking a plunge into the deep end of the pool. A little drowning never killed anyone.

(By now I've arrived at Seoul safe and sound)