Guidance Sessions

Hi guys!

Today I will talk about the guidance sessions that I've been attending for these last two weeks. Japan is a very organized country with many (to be honest, a lot of) documents and instructions. While it's a hassle to read every of these documents, it really helps you in long run as they provides all the information from the beginning. There's no orientation week when you entered Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University both for undergraduate students and graduate students, but there are several guidance sessions that you should attend. 

Information for a Successful Student Life Guidance

These are the guidance sessions:

1. Japanese Placement Test

It's not a guidance session to be honest, but rather a test to determine your starting Japanese class level from Survival I, Survival II, Communication I, Communication II, Communication III, and Communication IV according to your ability in Japanese language. This is for Graduate students, as Undergraduate students have more Japanese classes than us (they have Japanese Foundation I think). The test is divided into three different sections: participants who are good in Japanese language, participants who can write Hiragana and Katakana but only know basic Japanese language, and participants who starts Japanese language from zero (cannot write Hiragana and Katakana). At the end of the placement test they will tell you your Japanese language level.

2. Document Distribution

Here they'll give us the essential documents: Student ID Card and the Student Login ID. Student ID Card is something that you have to carry all the time: to get into AP House, APU Library, and other closed facilities. Student Login ID is used for logging in to the Wi-Fi hotspot, Campus Terminal (where all the important announcements are regarding academic events, part-time jobs, etc.) and CampusMate (student-related activities such as internship, course registration, etc.).

3. APU Library Orientation

Orientation how to use the library: the automatic rent and return system (it's really nice!), audio visual room, group study room, intensive study room, etc. The library itself is divided into six areas in two floors: the 'Lively' Ocean floor (where you are allowed to speak) and the 'Silent' Forest floor (where you are not allowed to speak). I'll write specifically about the library sometime in the future.

4. Course Registration and Grading

This guidance session tells you how to register for classes and how the grading system goes: how many credits are needed for graduation, what is the maximum number of credits, etc.

5. Information for a Successful Student Life

Provides a good range of information about the campus buildings and opening hours as well as good spots to shop and to dine in the Beppu downtown area, as well as various student activities that even us Graduate students can engage to.

6. Registration Procedures

Address registration and National Health Insurance registration. This is a very important session because you cannot do everything else without registering your address (making a bank account, point card, online shopping, etc.).

7. Career Planning and Job Hunting

Preparation class for students who is interested in working in Japan after graduation so that we know what we should gain within years of our study in order to be able to hired in a Japanese company.

8. Entrance Ceremony

Ritsumeikan APU Entrance Ceremony

The entrance ceremony is a quite fun ceremony, because we have to wear traditional clothes from our home country. There I met lots of international students wearing their traditional clothes, for example Japanese students wearing kimono. There's also some speeches from the President of the University as well as the mayor of Beppu city, as well as performances from countries all around the world such as Vietnam, Indonesia, China, etc.

9. Health Check Up

A mandatory health check up which is conducted every year. Here they'll do a urine test, chest X-ray, blood pressure, blood tests, visual acuity, physical measurements, and internal health consultation in the end. Personal note: surprisingly, my cholesterol goes down here. Seems I've walked a lot.

10. AP House Disaster Drill

AP House Disaster Drill Led by the Resident Assistants

A disaster drill or simulation of what we need to do when there's a fire and earthquake. They showed us the evacuation route as well as how to use the fire extinguisher in case of emergency.

11. MBA Orientation

Explanation about the MBA program as well as meet-and-greet with the faculty members. The graduate classroom was pretty cool and classical, it reminds me of the Hogwarts classrooms (in Harry Potter movies). We met some of the professors here and were able to have interesting conversations with them.

12. Health Care and Health Management

Guidance session on how to maintain our health during our study in Japan and how to have a 'healthy relationship' (Japan is a free country, after all). I won't write too much about this :P

13. Using the Co-op

Ritsumeikan APU has their own Co-op which is basically an organization that is run by APU for APU. Co-op basically handles the campus convenience store, campus cafetaria, and the campus cafe. Co-op system is integrated to our Student ID Card where we can charge our Student ID Card with money and use it to pay our convenience store / food bills.

14. Course Registration

Session for registering our class for one semester via website, just like most campus system do. It's a 'click war' for the undergraduate students to get their favorite classes because of the limited quota, but it seems calm enough for the graduate students.

15. AP House Entrance Ceremony

Residents of W4 Building at AP House Entrance Ceremony (from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Morocco)

Again, more like a celebration rather than guidance session. It's a party to meet more than 500 AP House residents with special performances from Resident Assistants (RAs). They provide a lot of food and drinks and everyone was having a great time.

16. JASSO Honors Scholarship

Session for the grantees of JASSO Honors Scholarship for Privately Financed International Students. This is a very important guidance session for everyone who is involved, as you'll lose your scholarship if you don't attend this guidance session.

17. How to Keep Your Scholarship

Session on rules and regulations to keep the scholarship for students who received scholarship either from the University, government, or other organizations.

18. The APU Scholarship System

Guidance session on how to search and apply for other scholarships to provide the students the financial aid they need so that they can concentrate more on their studies.

These 18 guidance sessions is not the end guys, there are still more guidance sessions even after the classes start: the bank account guidance session, the gym guidance session, etc. They provide guidance sessions for everything to the point of being annoying. A friend from America even jokes that he hasn't used his bathroom yet for two weeks because he was waiting for the 'Bathroom Guidance' :D

But still, very organized and informative: this is Japan.

It was a very long post, and I hope you were able to read this post until the end.

Thanks for reading guys!

AP House

Hi guys!

Today I'm going to write about my place of living during my Master study which is AP House, the Ritsumeikan APU's official dormitory for students (AP stands for Asia Pacific). AP House is mainly inhabited by first years students from all around the world, both undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduate students can only stay in AP House for their first year, and they have to move to Beppu downtown area during their second year, while Graduate students can stay all two years long during their study at Ritsumeikan APU (yeah!).

Source: http://www.apumate.net/aphouse/images/top_poster_sp.jpg

Though it's isolated from the all the shopping spots, AP House is only 10 minute walk from the classroom, which makes it a really convenient place to stay during campus time because if you stay at downtown area it would take minimum 30 minutes to reach the campus by bus.

There's two AP House building, AP House 1 and AP House 2: both are relatively new as the campus was built only 15 years ago. AP House 1 was built in 1999 (together with the campus), while AP House 2 was in 2001. The graduate students area is in the AP House 1, so that's where I am.

Front Entrance to AP House 1

AP House 1 has various public facilities. There's a common space for gathering, meeting rooms, night shop for emergency foods, media center, billyard, table soccer, and also piano. These last two are my favorite spots: the public bath and the tatami area. The public bath or onsen is open everyday except Monday and going to onsen is an amazing way to end a long day. As for the tatami area, they are commonly used for studying, but I always do my gathering, card game playing, and board game playing over there because it's super comfortable!

Tatami Area for Studying, Gathering, Playing, etc.

Now let's take a look at my personal room! I live in the W-Building of AP House 1 (the westernmost section of the dorm). In AP House itself, there's only a few gender-exclusive floors so most of the time it's mixed up between man and women. In W-Building, the 1st Floor is exclusively for man, while the 5th Floor is exclusively for women. I myself live in the 4th Floor.

W428 is my room number. It's W-Building, 4th Floor, Room number 28.

As you can see in the picture, there's a team of two people wearing orange shirts. These are the RA, or the Resident Assistants, who are also students of Ritsumeikan APU providing assistance for the AP House 1 resident. These two specifically provides assistance for the W4 residents, including me.

Let's move on to how the room looks. These are the bird eye view of my room:

Source: Ritsumeikan APU Enrollment Handbook

It's small but actually quite cozy and compact. Let me explain with picture by dividing my room in three areas: the Bed Area, the Desk Area, and the Closet Area.

The Bed Area

The Desk Area

The Closet Area

As you can see, there are a lot of compartments so we can keep everything neat and tidy. I easily misplaced small things so that's why I'm trying to be as neat as possible, There are several shared facilities on each floor including shower rooms (ranges from 4 to 6 shower rooms per floor), kitchen (IH-stove, microwave, toaster, and hot water dispenser).

Living at AP House is not so expensive. You need to pay JPY 39,000 per month for the rent, including the water, electricity, heater, telephone bill, and the internet. You need to also pay the insurance, deposit, and some other installment but I'm not going to discuss it here. If you want to know more, feel free to contact me!

That's it for this post guys. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

See you later.

Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

Hi guys!

Today I'm going to tell you about my University: Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, which is Ritsumeikan APU in short. Ritsumeikan APU is a private University which is the 'sister university' of the famous Ritsumeikan University Kyoto. This University is located at the mountains of Beppu, Japan. Here's what the University looks like:

Source: Instagram (@avilacarlo)

Source: http://www.universityinterchange.com/ritsumeikan-asia-pacific-university-apu/media

So, probably you're wondering: "What's a Beppu?" or "Where is it?".

Beppu is the name of a small city located at Oita Prefecture, in Kyushu Island. Kyushu itself is located at the southern part of Japan, so it's actually quite far from the famous cities such as Tokyo and Osaka (so don't expect me to post photos of Disneyland or Universal Studio Japan after this ok?). To give you a better understanding about where Kyushu is, let me give you an overview map of Japan:

Source: http://kyushu-japan-holidays.com/kyushu-guide.html

Beppu City itself is located right between the sea and the mountains so the wind is really strong here. And.., Ritsumeikan APU itself is not located at the downtown city of Beppu, but rather up high in the mountains of Beppu, so you can see a really amazing view from this University. Here's the city of Beppu from the University:

Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/101658588

Beppu is also famous for its hot springs, so there a lot of tourist from domestic and international who came here to relax. I'll write later about hot springs. Well it's a little bit isolated from all the city entertainments, but that what makes this campus so lively and fun because everyone is focused on studying and making new friends from all around the world. Wait, all around the world?

Ritsumeikan APU is actually very famous because of its multicultural environment where almost half of the student body is compromised of international students! Their fundamental principles are: Freedom, Peace and Humanity, International Mutual Understanding, and the Future Shape of Asia Pacific Region, so you can really feel that you're at the center of the world here with so many international students. This is the another reason why I applied for Ritsumeikan APU, because meeting lots of international students with different languages and cultures is an experience that you cannot get anywhere else.

Here classes are offered in two languages: Japanese and English, so you if you don't understand a thing about Japanese language, you can still take the classes fine. But of course, since you're in Japan you should learn Japanese too!

Now about the academic aspect. I'm taking the 2-years of MBA program in the Graduate School of Management right now. They have some specializations that we can choose in the MBA program including: Japanese Management, Marketing and Management, Finance and Accounting, and finally Innovation and Operations Management. I'm enrolling in Marketing and Management specialization because I really liked marketing and I'm passionate about learning lots of new things from the professors here.

Currently the classes are yet to begin because Japanese academic calendar divides the year into two: the Spring Semester (starts on April 1) and the Fall Semester (starts on October 1) but I have lots of orientation workshops to attend. So far so good, I'm gonna like it here.

So to end this post, here's a picture of me together with my friends:

Caption: Graduate School Life! I'm the one wearing a Charmander shirt.

This picture was taken today after the orientations. The wind was pretty strong, but we had fun. There are three nationalities present here: Indonesia, Thailand, and Mongolia.

That's for today's post guys.
Next time I'll post about my dorm: AP House.

Thanks for reading!

Departure

Hi guys!

I've just arrived in Japan for few days and I decided to start writing my 'first' blog post, which is about my departure. To be honest, the departure was a really memorable and tough one. It's going to be a long post, so let's begin!

After loads of preparation, my departure date is set on Thursday, September 17th 2015. My campus has a representative office in Indonesia and they had arranged for Indonesian students to travel together from our home country to the campus which is located in Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. In total, there are 87 Indonesian students (84 Undergraduate students and 3 Graduate students).

The plan is that we will go from Jakarta to Haneda (an airport in Tokyo, the capital city of Japan) by Garuda Indonesia for transit, and then from Haneda we will fly to Fukuoka (the biggest city at Kyushu island) by ANA, (All Nippon Airways, a Japan-operated airline company). Here's what the itinerary looks like:

But things don't always go right according to plan, right?

Our flight from Jakarta to Haneda was delayed because of technical failure. The aircraft was damaged so the officials moved us to a smaller aircraft. And that's where all the problem started. The number of the passengers was 16 passengers over the capacity of the smaller plane, so Garuda Indonesia have to re-route 16 passengers to another destination (which is Osaka) because there's no other aircraft available for Haneda. The process took a long time and our flight which supposed to take off at 23:15 got delayed until around 00:40 (almost 1,5 hours of delay). We arrived at Haneda at about 09:50 local time in the morning and we're rushing for the domestic flight to Fukuoka. We're supposed to meet an official from Garuda Indonesia to assist our arrival at Japan but we didn't, so we have to take care of everything by ourselves.

First, we have to go through the immigration. Since we're staying for years here, we go through a different set of process than the tourists. We have to fill up some forms and have our fingerprints taken, one-by-one. Then, we must wait for our Residence Card (it's like our ID in Japan) to be printed out before proceeding to the baggage claim. By the time we arrived at the baggage claim, it's already past 11:00 and the baggage drop counter for domestic departure had already closed, so we have to carry all our luggage by ourselves all the way to the Domestic Terminal in another terminal. Let me remind you that our flight to Fukuoka was supposed to take off at 11:30 and we're yet done with the process, as we still need to go through Customs Declaration and then checking-in again at the Domestic Departure for our second boarding pass. Also by 11:00, not all of our group members have finished the Immigration process yet (because we're travelling in a group of 87), so..., our group missed the flight to Fukuoka.

It was a mess then because there's nobody that accompanies us and we're struggling because the ANA Staff who's handling domestic departures cannot speak English as well as we thought. Our group was scattered across Haneda with no means of communication (because to use the Wi-Fi in Haneda is a little bit troublesome as we need to register before using it) so we're having difficulty coordinating our next course of action. Short story after hours of frustration, the Garuda officials has decided that it is their fault that we miss our flight to Fukuoka because of the first flight's delay and decided to send us to Fukuoka via Shinkansen, the famous Japan bullet train. The reason that we didn't get into the next flight is because all the remaining flights to Fukuoka was full that day because Japan was on National Holiday chain from Saturday to Wednesday (which is called the Silver Week).

So, our group went all the way from Tokyo to Fukuoka with Nozomi Train, the fastest train on Tokaido Shinkansen. Well some information for you guys: Shinkansen is not the name for the train itself, but rather, the bullet train track. Tokaido Shinkansen is the track that connects the major cities in Japan: Tokyo/Yokohama-Nagoya-Osaka/Kyoto. There are three categories of bullet trains that operate in the Tokaido Shinkansen, which is explained thoroughly in this image below.

Source: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2018_tokaido.html

We departed from Shinagawa JR Shinkansen Tokyo at 15:47 and finally arrived at Hakata Station (Hakata is the old name of Fukuoka) at 20:51. Yeah, it's a 5-hours trip by train! At Hakata Station we are picked up by the Indonesian senior students. From there, we went to our dorm by bus and arrived at around 01:15. But it's not over. There's a room guidance session which is mandatory for the moving-in students for about an hour, and I remember arriving in my room at around 02:40.

The first day is always the hardest, but this one really takes the cake. It's a 30-hours journey for me because I have to fly from Surabaya to Jakarta before and I'm extremely tired because I'm not a person who can sleep well on flights. My iPhone is dead also because there's no electric plug at the flight so I didn't manage to take any pictures in Japan T_T

Next time, I'm going to tell you about my campus as well as give you guys pictures ok?

See you then.