By James Derrick

My time in Scotland has finally come to an end and what an amazing experience it was! I am extremely grateful to have been able to do this and I’m sad to have left what had been my home for 6 months. 

Highlights

The main highlights of my exchange were definitely the multiple International Student Tours Scotland trips I did. These were a super easy way to see a lot of the country with heaps of other international students from all around the world. I would highly recommend the Isle of Skye weekend trip to anyone who can do it, we stayed in Portree and the buildings and scenery there are awesome. Since this is an overnight trip, you also get to spend more time exploring the town more thoroughly with the same group of people.

Another highlight was living right in Glasgow’s city centre. My accommodation building was a 10-minute walk from Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street which are the main streets of the city. I couldn’t believe how many people were walking up and down these streets every day! Even during the weekend, there’s not a huge number of people in Tauranga city centre but every day the two main streets in Glasgow were packed with people going about their day which made exploring the city even more interesting.

Challenges

The first challenge I faced was getting very sick the day after landing. The whole first week I spent in Scotland I was in bed pretty much the whole time. This meant I missed out on all the information sessions for exchange students which wasn’t ideal, but it didn’t take long to get up to speed once classes had started. 

Another challenge was getting used to having such a large campus. Tauranga campus is only one building so it never takes more than a minute or two to move between classes. However, the Strathclyde campus is spread out over 3 or 4 large city blocks so when I had different classes straight after one another I had to rush as it would sometimes take 10 or more minutes to move between classes in different buildings.

What I learnt from this experience

The chance to study at a different university with a completely different education system has been really beneficial. I had a closed-book external exam for every paper which was something that took a bit of adjusting to, but it helped me build better study habits that I’ve been able to retain and use to improve my study at Waikato. I also learnt to better appreciate the much smaller Tauranga campus, and that here I can have personal relationships with all my lecturers and tutors compared to the much larger Strathclyde campus where I felt a lot more like ‘just another number’ that has to fight with hundreds of other students just for a conversation with a lecturer.

Moving out of home for the first time and living in a different country has also made me a lot more confident and independent as a person. I’m now going to be much better at adjusting to big changes in my life and I feel much more prepared for after I graduate Waikato when I plan on moving to a different city.

I’m also now super keen to, at the very least, go back to the UK to travel some more and potentially move back there to live again.