Christmas in Singapore

About a week before the holidays we decided to go to Singapore for Christmas and New Year. Because Singapore is one of the most expensive countries in Southeast Asia and since we wanted to meet some new people, I decided to try couchsurfing. This is a website where people from all over the world offer their couch or a spare mattress to travelers. After sending about 40 messages to people in Singapore, we were lucky that Sven (from Norway, but living in Singapore) offered his couch for the first couple of days of our stay.

We arrived there at the 23rd in the late evening and apart from sleeping we didn't do much. But the next day we prepared for the Christmas party that took place in the evening. I cooked a curry while Sairozi and Sven made 2 different kinds of cookies and a cake. It turned out super-delicious and I ate way too much during the party.



The next day some couchsurfers had organised a tour through the city. At the moment there is a campaign to protect elephants in Singapore and you can find elephant figures all around the city. The aim of our tour was to see as many different elephants as possible. Here you can see my favourites:

Course evaluation

Today was the last class before the holidays and the exams and it's about time to give some grades. As students we're getting grades all the time, but today it's the other way round.

Thai language (C+):
In the beginning of my stay I found this course very usefull, because we learned many words that we could use in everyday life such as different dishes, fruits or numbers. What I didn't like was that within 3 months our teacher changed 3 times and they all had very different teaching methods. Personally I found it the hardest with the second teacher so after studying Thai for 1,5 months my motivation was lost. Even though I enjoyed the 3rd teachers classes I decided to drop out of this class 2 weeks before the christmas holidays, due to the fact that I will be unable to attend the final exam.

Marketing (B-):
I like the subject so I was quite motivated to take Marketing. The teacher was trying really hard to make everyone understand the subject, but unfortuntely the English of some of the Thai students was still quite limited so it often took a lot of time to finish a topic. That made it a bit boring sometimes. Another thing I didn't like was, that we were supposed to have a quiz on every topic, but often the quizzes were canceled or postponed. The course syllabus said that only the ten best scores of the quizzes would count for our final grade so less quizzes means that we cannot improve our grade, if we didn't do well in one of the quizzes.

Strategic Management (B+):
Looking back at this course I must say that it was one of my favourites, even though I wasn't so sure about it in the first place. I liked that we had group discussions and short presentations instead of quizzes, because we could practice our presentation skills and got feedback afterwards. The pace was a little faster than Marketing, which was good as well. During the last two weeks we played a simulation game during the classes. In the beginning I was a bit sceptical but that quickly changed and I got really motivated to win this game with my group. In the end we got 2nd out of 8 which is not too bad either :)

International Business (B):
I give this class a B because we were talking about a lot of things that I've heard before so sometimes it wasn't as interesting for me than it could have been. However, some of my friends said it was their favourite class. It was definitely the one were we had to do the most work. 3 case studies, lots of homework, inclass exercises and at least 1 quiz per week made sure that we were busy during the semester.

Bureaucracy

The last week has kept me really busy. As I have written before my home university requires me to make learning agreements BEFORE I start studying abroad in order to transfer the credits for the courses I attend. However, since the classes I intended to take were sceduled at the same time I decided to take International Business instead of Human Resource Management. Unfortunatley I didn't have a learning agreement for that class, which got me a little stressed out last week. In the end I wrote I really nice letter to my university begging them to give me a learning agreement even though I was 2 months late... and it worked! Two days later they had send it to my mom's address, which means I don't have to take the same course again in Germany :D

Apart from the learning agreement more good news awaited me last week. We got our grades for the midterm exams and they turned out really well. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to celebrate because back home a couple of case studies waited to be finished.

I must say that I'm pretty surprised how much work needs to be done at this university compared to my courses in Germany, where there usually is one final exam which counts for 100% of the grade. At PSU the exams (each, midterm and final exam) usually count for 20-30% of the grade. Apart from this we need to submit at least 1 case study and we get grades for either group discussions and presentations or quizzes (about 10-12! per subject). The Thais really know how to keep someone busy!

Midterm exams

During the last week of November we had our midterm exams, which count for about 30% of our final grade. So I was quite busy studying. Luckily the exams turned out to be not too difficult and I'm looking forward to getting the results. Apart from the midterm exams we have to submit several case studies (1 for Marketing, 3 for International Business and 1 for Strategic Management) that kept me busy even after the exams.

However, last week a friend of mine visited us in Phuket so I had an excuse to postpone working on the case studies and do some fun stuff instead :) We went to play badminton at the university and spend lots of time at the beach, which was heaps of fun. I also found some time to make an advent calendar for Sairozi and I bought myself a small one at the Big C supermarket. It was even made in Germany!