Archive for Ian Bethune

Organizing an exchange placement abroad becomes an education in itself

Whether your idea of travel is sipping margaritas on a beach or immersing yourself in foreign cultures, you probably never believed the hardest part would come before you stepped on the plane. Not, that is, unless you’ve ever been on a university exchange: for that true Alice-in-Wonderland experience, try one, and watch yourself fall right down the rabbit hole.

I am a fine arts student at Toronto’s York University about to head to Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, for a third-year exchange program offered through York. That program, York International, is pretty much why I enrolled there. While the university’s entrance scholarships were attractive, it was a brief high school presentation on exchange possibilities that sealed the deal. I wanted that badly to go overseas.

Not so fast, though. Given universities’ bureaucratic nature, going on exchange is not as simple as clicking your heels together and saying I want to go to Australia. At the mid-October 2008 information session I was handed the application package, fat enough to shoot my first overseas plan down in flames. I had wanted to go to Japan for years, ever since becoming hooked on manga. But Japan’s application deadline was just two weeks away. Faced with essay demands and this elaborate a year for York exchange, with one reserved for a law student.

A month later came word that Flinders had accepted me, and that York International had given me a scholarship. I went from despair to elation in seconds, blithely ignorant of the fact that York’s bureaucracy was far from finished with me, and that Flinders’s was just getting started. Forms flew into my inbox from both ends of the earth. It didn’t help that the Australian school year (March to December) doesn’t correspond with ours in the northern hemisphere. Officials at the two schools were concentrating on different priorities. Even Ontario’s student loan program got in on the act, seeking repayments last fall because I was not enrolled full-time at either York or Flinders.

Prime among my application needs were a student visa, health insurance notifications, power of attorney forms and housing. I started falling behind, losing track of what had to be filled out in what order by what deadline. It was November 2009 before I realized I was missing Flinders’s residence application. More forms were cheerfully sent—arriving exactly one day after the deadline.

But nothing loomed larger than the question of what classes I was going to take. It took months, but by mid-December I had received course approval from York and Flinders. But when I went to register in my classes over Christmas break, I learned that of the four topics approved, three were on the same day over the same four hours. I was incensed. Why would they approve impossibilities? Apparently, at Flinders, one department approves, and another—which hadn’t swung into action yet—tells you if it works out. And once you learn about the conflict, that doesn’t mean you simply fill in substitutes—they too have to go through the approval pipeline.

All this was in spite of the efforts of the people in the York and Flinders international offices, who regularly went out of their way to help me—one at Flinders even took time out of his Christmas holidays. But the system itself is flawed. Holding mass meetings, as York does, before the host universities send out their forms, doesn’t help much: students don’t yet know the questions to ask. Although the applications are general—you can apply to Hong Kong, Spain and Britain at one time—the acceptances, and the consequent paperwork, are university-specific. And it doesn’t come to you all at once. It would have been an enormous benefit to me if I could have worked through everything all together with someone who knew Flinders’s needs. In short, you are responsible for getting everything in on time—a reasonable enough demand on a university student, except there is no real mechanism to ensure you know what “everything” consists of.

By January I had to ditch the course quagmire and shift my focus to getting to Australia, no simple task either. I reviewed my budget and came up with a plan: a three-day bus trip across Canada to Vancouver, staying with an uncle for a couple of days, then flying (via San Francisco) to Sydney and from there to Adelaide. An odyssey set to take seven days, over three countries and a dozen cities—but by far the cheapest way there.

So here I am. I may have a monster journey ahead, and nowhere to stay when I get there, but that’s nothing compared to surviving an existential struggle with two university bureaucracies. It’s all good now . . . right?