Orientation Week March 2019 Kindai University Student Exchange Program

Okay, so I’ve been here for a little over a week now. Orientation was a lot to take and rough, but also helpful in almost everything. Getting from the airport to my dorm was tough. Because of airline timing, I missed the pickup deadline from the airport to the school and had to book my first time somewhere to stay my myself. Stayed at TRAD hotel, it was cheap and it’s basically an apartment to yourself for like $40/night. Also close to a station. The next day, I actually put one of my luggage(I brought 2 with me) in a locker at the station and just went to school with one first, because not all the stations have elevators so you have to carry everything up and downstairs by yourself, which was really tough the night I landed. I decided to pay the 300yen for the locker and come back for the other luggage later. After going to school, I had to lug my luggage to orientation for exchange students. There are about 20 of us and I’m the only one from America. Kinda shocked because I at least expected a few more from the states. Guess Kindai is not a popular choice for Americans. The majority of the exchange students are European, and a handful are Asian. By the way on the first day,  students living in different dorms meet separately. Meaning students who will be dorming with the school meets together while students who decided to live in a single apartment meets in a different group. On the second day, everyone meets together and they go over school stuff. 

After the first day of orientation which was mostly about living situations and filling out forms to stay there, someone from Nasic (the company in charge of our living quarters) took me to my apartment to check in. All your appliances are in Japanese so better remember when they teach you how to use it. The apartment, which is called Peacock House I, is right next to a convenience store and is a 5 minute walk to school (not the main entrance though, to one of the side gates). The building uses a card as a key (like hotels) and it’s important to not lose these because the find is like $250, or so I’ve been told. They also ask you to not keep it close to your cell (I guess some students used to put it in their phone cases) because this can mess with the magnetism or code of they key card. 

I also noticed that most students came in groups or with friends from their home universities so it kind of makes it hard on the first few days to meet new people. They are already sitting in cliques. But I did make a friend from Indonesia on the 2nd day since she also came solo and is a solo like me. We had lots to talk about. Just had to put myself out there and talk to new people. 

The second day of orientation, they went over rent payment. It’s two separate transactions via a machine like and ATM. It’s cash only and there are 2 separate deadlines to meet. You can pay it all at once, but just with two separate transactions and make sure to take the receipt and turn it in at the international center office for proof and to get it stamped. Unfortunately, the machine is only in Japanese. There is an English option but that option only works for teacher users. So, sucks for the rest of us. However, they do print out instructions for international students who can’t read Japanese in the orientation handout. Thank god. At the end, students separate into groups and there’s a local student who shows you where to make your payment (it’s in the food court). However, the local students aren’t all trained (or least mines wasn’t) because whenever we asked questions they couldn’t really answer us. We just ended up figuring out things ourselves. 

In the package they give you for orientation includes the classes offered as well as the syllabus for the classes. Full time requirements is 7 classes, but you can sign up for more. Each class only meets once a week and according to the syllabus, most of them are graded based only on a midterm and final exam. We’ll see how this goes. After going to the classes you want to attend, you will fill out a form electronically and email it to Makiko to register for classes. Can’t wait to see how school and classes go. Apparently Kindai is considered to be a prestigious private school (according to local students) so I have high expectations. Oh yeah, can’t forget about your student ID. This is really important because you have to scan your ID at the beginning of every class to take attendance! Fancy! A certain amount of late marks makes an absent and international students are not allowed to miss a class more than 3 times. If I remember correctly after the 4th time you automatically fail the course. You also have to check in with the international center during the beginning of every month so that they can make sure you are attending classes properly. You can keep track of your attendance record online on the school website. But unfortunately, it’s also only in Japanese so you just have to ask for help and memorize from there. You can pick up your student ID during the first week of school.

After the orientation, they had an optional course for students to attend if they wanted to learn about and/or open a phone plan. According to the phone plan representative, plans changes depending on the semester but you basically buy SIM cards based on the amount of data you want per month. I decided to just stick with my original monthly plan from the states, although my data is a little slow, it still works. I don’t really need to make phone calls home and nowadays, you can do this through a lot of apps for free through wifi. So I opted out  for this, however if anyone needs  or uses a lot of data per month, I would highly recommend purchasing a plan. They help you with the process right then and there after the short course about it and it cancels automatically when you leave. 

I think that’s about it for orientation. Some weird thing to point out is that for my emergency contact, I wanted to put my brother on it and they wouldn’t let me. Which I thought was strange. I explained that it was because my mother is Chinese and doesn’t understand English but they explained that they would find a translator if needed. I still think that it’s weird that they wouldn’t allow me to put my younger brother as my emergency contact. Is this a cultural thing? Also, I want to take the Japanese language courses they are offering for international students, however you have to take a placement test. I explained to the teacher that I took Japanese over 10 years ago and would like to take the beginning level course but they still made me take the placement test so I basically just sat there for about 1.5hrs. I just filled in the dots randomly (I did try) for the ones I didn’t understand. 

Now that orientation is over, I have about 4-5 days of free time before school actually starts and will be going to Tokyo with a friend from home! Can’t wait.