Vanessa Yofania, an undergraduate student in Textile Craft, Faculty of Arts and Design, Institut Teknologi Bandung got a chance to spend time abroad at Seoul, South Korea as an exchange student

She departed on February as an awardee of Indonesia International Student Mobility Awards (IISMA) 2021. All awardees of IISMA’s first batch were supposed to depart for Fall semester of 2021, but due to the pandemic condition, some regions got deferred to the Spring semester of 2022.

She studied in one of the most prestigious universities in South Korea, a part of SKY (the Ivy League of South Korea), Yonsei University. The campus is located in the capital city, Seoul. Since student intakes for higher education in South Korea are extremely competitive, it is such an honour for her to be able to study here. There are also 3 more students who got IISMA, Kayla from Textile Craft 2019, Olivia and Rana from Interior Design 2018. 

She went through two selection process, the screening and the interview. For the screening, I submitted several datas needed and along that was an essay of answers to four questions provided by IISMA. After passing the screening round, the selection continued with the interview and then I waited around two weeks for the final result to be announced. For the second batch, IISMA 2022 however, IISMA added one more selection process, a test for Indonesia’s cultural and diversity insight prior to the interview round. 

“Becoming an exchange student gave such a grand opportunity to see and feel the world through my own senses, and I got to see so many new perspectives from the wonderful people I got meet here. Through the program I also hope we got to introduce our country and shows how impactful, insightful, and wonderful Indonesians are”, she said.