Studying in Taiwan

Caution: Written by Non-native English Speaker

(Bahasa Indonesia version is available in other post)

Dream belongs to anyone. No matter if you are poor, foolish, ugly or anything. Just dream, dream big, although it seems impossible.  You don’t need to pay for dreaming. I have my childhood dream. A dream to go to university, for a higher study, for a great knowledge. That’s all. Yes, it’s too ordinary for most people.  Nothing is special with going to university. But for a poor girl like me, studying in university was nearly impossible. I was born in a remote village, which had no access to electricity yet, which could only be reached by horses as means of transport. At my primary school, SDN 173619 Panamparan, there was only one honorary teacher. We paid him by rice, every student brought 1 liter of rice to school every month. I graduated from that school only having the ability to read and write, and a little Mathematics. I did not speak Indonesian at all, I only knew our local language (Bataknese dialect).

            In 2009 the childhood dream came true. I was admitted to study in the best university in North  Sumatra. Living it with hard work, fighting for it with great effort, and finishing it perfectly. It turned out the dream yielded another new dream, a dream that I tightly hold until now. After finishing my undergraduate study, I worked for one year. The dream didn’t fade, kept knocking at my head from the inside. During working, I took time to take a private English course.  Actually, I really hate learning English, I’m a slow learner. But I know that the dream obliges me to do that. In fact, my English ability was not improved much even though I had learned desparately.

With a very low TOEFL score, I encouraged myself to try Taiwan scholarship. I applied for spring semester admission. Unfortunately, of all the applications I sent, none of them admitted me. I was so dissappointed. I had spent a lot of money, been so tired for the application process, been so exhausted between working and studying, just to fail after all. In my heart I knew that I deserved it. I did not have a cum laude GPA to fulfill the common requirement for international scholarship, I’m not a smart student! It’s not a surprise that with the slightly above the average GPA  I did not pass the selection.  It was just like an owl longing the moon (traditional saying), that perfectly described me. I was down, upset. It seemed that I dreamed too far.  But in the middle of the failure, I pondered about the dream again. It was so strong that my disappointment could not stop it. No, I will never give up. Not to the failure, neither to problems, nor to English. I tried and tried again to improve my English. Why’s this language so hard?

The next semester, I tried to apply again for fall semester admission. Many applications sent, many failures. There was only one university which admitted me with partial scholarship, a scholarship which exempted me from tuition payment. It was a public university in Taiwan, a university that I knew would be the place for me to continue that childhood dream.

After struggling raising money, after a long preparation which took a lot of energy and time, and after a tough discussion with my parents, I finally left for the Formosa country. My parents are growing old, they’re about 70 years old back then. It was understandable that they found it hard to let me go for a higher study. They thought I’d better work and make money, get married and give them grandchildren.

I did feel the real struggle after arriving in Taiwan. Our major, Economics (Pure Economics) was taught bilingual, half English and half Mandarin. I had already known it even since the first time I applied to the university.  But for me, it was a challenge, and I thought I was ready to face it.  Well, they said bilingual, in fact our lecturers many times forgot to speak in English. J. We studied in regular class, together with local students. At the time, there were only two international students in our class, I and my bestfriend, Dori. Actually it was apparently a dilemma to our lecturers. If they speak in English, the local students find it difficult to understand, and if they speak in Mandarin, both of us understand nothing. If they speak billingual, then the necessary abundant material will not be covered all. So awry indeed. You can imagine what I was facing in the class with my mediocre English and zero Mandarin ability.

There was a course, which due to time constraints, had to be taught entirely in Mandarin, Mathematical Economics. For this course, I had to lift my white flag. To make it worse, that course is the basic for all other subjects. Honestly, even if it was explained in Indonesian, I would not necessarily understand that subject. To me the material was really hard as it applies mathematical concepts in Economics. Everything became worse as it was taught in foreign language. Where the formula comes from, when to use it, what it is for, I really did not understand. Gosh, I felt nausea, dizziness, and sweating as I saw the combination of Calculus and the plaid Mandarin character on the board. With the Mandarin explanation of our lecturer at the time, I felt like there were wasps flying near my ears. Ngang ngung ngeng, that was what I heard for three hours every lecture. Although I had enough sleep and ate well, after three hours lecture I used to feel like I had not slept for one week and had not eaten for two days, so limp.  I know it sounds exaggerating, but it’s true. Even though so, we kept waiting patiently for our lecturer to speak in English. Once we heard one word in English, we would raise our head trying to heed what he said. In fact, every single word we heard was not enough to make us understand all of the material in that subject.

            Dori... She’s been my friend since we were in undergraduate study. I left for Taiwan with her. We were the only international students in our department. Unlike me, she was the most brilliant student in our previous college, Faculty of Economics, in the top university in Sumatera, with cumlaude GPA and above 600 TOEFL score. But in Taiwan, we faced the same conditions. In the first semester, her excellent English ability was barely used at all. Ah, poor her. The material and the degree that we were proud of and we cherished before were almost useless in Taiwan. It’s funny, huh, yet we did Economics in both. Did we start from zero? No, we started from negative.  In addition, we were not used to the lecturers in Taiwan who are so disciplined in almost everything.

When master students in other majors were busy with papers and research, we were still bombarded with theories and exams. There were final test, mid-term test, and two times quiz for each course. If we took 3 courses, how many test did we have in one semester? I was really depressed. I experienced great difficulties in understanding the explanations of the formulas in English textbooks. I tried to find related literature in Indonesian, but I did not find anything, which is weird. You can imagine how limited the resources that support Economics as a discipline in Indonesia is. Economics develops? Yes, there have been so many theories which change as human civilization grows. Just a simple example, we used to define ‘market’ as a ‘place’ where seller and buyer meet to do a transaction. But now we can do online transaction which does not need any physical place, right?

            All of that forced us to study hard by ourselves. English textbooks, lectures in Mandarin, and poor English complemented my suffering from weak mathematical ability. Actually, the lecturers were so kind and helpful. They always tried to help us and be open up for discussions. But having discussion for hours would not be enough for us to catch up, we were falling behind. Moreover, the lecturers also worked professionally by not discriminating us in exam and grading. The exam questions were in English, and the students could either answer them in English or Mandarin. Of course I answered them in English, for it was impossible to make it in Indonesian although I really wanted to J. The lecturers also graded objectively according to our real capabilities.

I was really frustrated on our first mid-term test for Microeconomics, after almost one month lecture, when I did not understand much yet. There were seven questions, each of which had 3-6 items. Each item in one question was related to one another. So, if we did mistake in solving a certain item, we might also make mistake in other items of the same question. No tolerance in grading. If we just followed the right direction but ended up in a incorrect answer, no score would be given. We would only get scored if we made everything correct.

One week after the test, our lecturer distributed our answer sheet that she already checked to let us know our grade. She checked everything carefully and pointed the mistakes we did on the answer sheet.  When the paper was handed over, it was flipped and closed. But I unintentionally saw the grade of some of my classmates and I overheard conversations among them. One got 65, the other got 70, and the other one got 100. Me??? When the lecturer called my name and handed over the sheet, I knew that she was looking at me with a great pity. I tried to smile at her, as if I was saying that I was ready for that. I tried to be tough my heart was shedding bloody tears.  When I got to my seat, I opened my answer sheet and saw that number. Oh my goodness! Is it even real? 2 out of 100??? I almost fainted, I felt limp, my head was so heavy and my sight was dizzy. I just wanted to cry. I gathered my remainding energy to prevent those tears from embarrassing me. I smiled while looking at that sheet, it could not be worse. I took time to take a photo of it before returning it to the lecturer, that moment was worth documenting because I knew it would be an unforgettable experience to me. Yeah, the lowest grade I had in my life. I actually prayed that it would also be the last. It’s enough! I could not imagine to endure the same painful experience. No more.

            That evening, 24^th December 2014 before the Christmas eve, we went to see the lecturer to talk about my ‘fate’ ahead. I wanted to know if I could have a remedial test or at least additional assignment to get my grade a little bit better. But the lecturer did not approve it. She was consistent on the standard that she made without any exception. She only suggested me to do my best. A Christmas wish ended our talk. I did realize that I was the most foolish student in our class. The mid-term grade had already broken my hope to pass the course, no matter how much I would get on the final test. It’s so sad, you know, it was my Christmas gift in 2014.

The other two courses were not better. Do you know this  Econometrics course, a course that combines Mathematics, Statistics, and Economics Theories, with the help of computer programmes? On the mid-term test, there were 10 questions and as usually, they each had their items. We had 3 hours to work on those questions. But I already started sweating even when I just opened the question sheet and realized that I understood nothing. Though I tried so hard to prepare myself by sleeping only 2 hours per day the week before the test, it did not help. I tried to dig my memory, trying to remember every formula that we learned and figuring out how to apply it. I kept working on it although I myself did not know what I was writing. Finally, in the first thirty minutes I gave up, I did not know what to write anymore.  I did not find any reason to stay longer just to fall asleep. I took a glance at Dori and found that she’s in the same situation. I sent her a signal to get out of the room. Okay. She got my signal properly. We handed in the answer sheet which was almost entirely blank. The lecturer assistant who watched us wondered. He might think that we were so amazing. When our classmates needed more than 3 hours, we had even left the class in half an hour.

I have another unforgettable experience related to this poor English ability. For Macroeconomics, we were required to present a  paper. Well, it was supposed to be my first experience for English presentation. I was in the same group with Dori and we got the last turn to present, so we had about two months to prepare for it. During the two months, Dori prepared for our presentation material and we had some meeting with our lecturer discussing the parts that we did not understand in the paper. The lecturer taught us patiently even for very basic problems that we should have learned since our undergraduate study. Actually, it was a  big trouble for me to understand every single formula and calculation in the paper. If I have to be honest, there was hardly any part that I completely understood.

We finally decided to share the task with Dori so we could focus on our each part. I got the middle part which was supposed to be the easiest, yet still so difficult for me. Anyway, I kept learning the paper slowly while trying to memorize the words that I would mention in every slide. When we practiced, Dori taught me the pronunciation of some words which I found hard to pronounce.

“Not like that, it’s wrong”, Dori said with annoyance.

“What’s wrong? What’s the right one?”, I defended.

Dori pronounced the words two or three times .

“I pronounced it that way”, I interrupted her, since I intended to pronounce it the way she did, but different sound came out of my lips.

“F#ck, you pronounced it this way...”, she said in her Bataknese accent.

Huh, why is it very hard??? It happens many times I don’t pronounce exactly what is on my mind. I often argue with Dori about pronunciations. With all of that, can you imagine how my presentation went? Okay… When Dori presented, all the students in my class still paid attention on her or at least looked at the presentation slides. Our lecturer also still nodded, showing that he understood. Well, it’s my turn. Gee! More than a half of my classmates fell asleep while the rest did not care.  It was only our lecturer who tried to heed, even though I know that he was also confused about what I said. Hufft... what should I do with this English?

This tongue feels so stiff when I speak in English. So clumsy. Maybe because I have been eating chilli too much? I have been trying to learn English since I was in junior high school, I even took some private courses for that.  After I finished my undergraduate study and worked, I still set my time and money aside to take private English course. When I worked, I attended a course in a renowned English language institute in Indonesia, for which Dori worked as a teaching staff. So, why should I pay expensive to the institute only to be taught by my close friend? Isn’t it better if Dori just give me the private course directly?

Yep, Dori once taught me privately, but she gave up on me. She said that I never studied seriously, that I fooled around and changed the schedule at my will. “Just go to the institute, you need to pay expensive so that you can study seriously”, she said at that moment. That’s how I came back to the institute and learned English there again. Dori occassionally taught in my class. Can you imagine Dori was teaching in front and I was sitting sweetly as one of her students? It felt like we were studying at her home or mine, I just felt funny. Sometimes I teased her and my classmates got confused as they did not know that Dori was my best friend. And finally my English was not  improved much.

So hard indeed. But I have always known that hard does not mean impossible. That’s the principle that I always hold onto. Just because I can’t speak English, it does not mean that  I must stop pursuing my dream. No! I will keep going although there are so many obstacles. However, I must be ready for all possible consequences and resilient for any possible storm awaiting for me ahead.

I went through the winter holiday anxiously waiting for our final grade to be posted. Every breath I took was a long sigh releasing all the pain inside. Actually, I am not the kind of student who is crazy about high GPA and values grade more than the knowledge itself. Since I was in my undergraduate study, I have never cared much about the grade that our lecturers give as long as I know that I have done my best. It may sound exaggerating, but I care more about the knowledge which can support me to reach out my dream. I used to sit in the back seat because I was bored reading and listening to the same materials that I knew, did not change from year to year. Moreover, writing the material dictated by our lecturer from his old note was really not my thing. When the final test came, the highest score used to belong to those who could fulfill all the answer sheet.  Those like me who were not good at free-writing would get low grades. No wonder many A-grades roam in students transcripts, I don’t know where they came from. But there were also times when I found my self sitting in the front seat and listening intently to the explanation of my favourite lecturer.

But in Taiwan, the way I perceive grade totally changed. Grade became very important to me as it had to do with my life overall. We had to re-apply our scholarship every semester and the assessment was mainly based on GPA. That was what made me so uneasy during the weeks of grade announcement. Yes, it was coming. On that night, my heart was finally broken into pieces. I was so devastated knowing that I failed that course, the required course which gave me the opportunity to experience what it feels like to get a grade 2 out of 100. Yep, required course. My failure meant that I had to retake that most difficult course in the next year, again. And just like what I already predicted, I got a very very low GPA. Yeah, very low. Below 3 in a scale of 4.5. Gosh! It was the lowest grade ever in my life. Even with a scale of 4 in my previous study, I had never got that low. I was supposed to be ready for that, but still I could not accept that I was that idiotic. I was speechless, I did not know what to say anymore. I could not keep my tears from falling, it finally flowed from my eyes.

 I lost my hope to get scholarship in the next semester. Not only did I lose my competitiveness, I even could not fulfill the minimum GPA requirement for applying scholarship. I felt like a real laggard at the time, the dumbest of all the students in my class, a f#cking failure. I was so devastated, frustrated, depressed. I just wanted to shout but I could not. Okay fine, life is not as dramatic as in telenovela movie indeed, sometimes. No choice, I had to go on. I had to prepare myself for the worst possibility in the next semester, that I would not get scholarship anymore. I and Dori tried to find a job for winter vacation. We went from door to door asking for a job, to be dishwasher, cleaner, or anything that could give us good money. And again, language was the problem, all restaurants rejected us since we could not speak Mandarin.    

I turned my mind, trying to think about jobs which do not require us to speak Mandarin. Yay, farming! Thank God, we were admitted to work at an organic farm during the winter holiday. We had to fight against the cold weather  in the winter which pierched our skins, wake up early in the morning to prepare our lunch and have breakfast. At 5.30, when people were still sleeping soundly, we already left our dormitory, riding our bike to the farm. We worked for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. Sometimes if our boss asked us work on Saturdays and Sundays, we would take them half a day. We did so many things in the farm, such as plowing, planting, and harvesting vegetables. After the first three days of working,  we really felt exhausted, our whole bodies felt so sore and we could not sleep. For us as children of farmers, the job was actually not so hard. But we needed some time to adjust. After one week, we got used to that tiredness, we even started to enjoy it as what we used to do in our home village.

When the holiday was over, we quitted working in the farm. The tight schedule and the hard materials did not allow us to take part-time job. With the very low and ineligible GPA, I was still determined to apply for the scholarship. I really depended on the scholarship since it was impossible for me to expect my parents. They were still so poor as they had always been, and old. While waiting for the announcement, my heart beat so fast everytime I remembered it. The time came, we got to know the result earlier from our professor (he was also the chairman of our department) who was one of the juries in the scholarship selection.

“Dami dan Dori, I just attended the meeting for international scholarship selection. And unfortunately I got bad news for you, you two only get type C scholarship, your grades are way too low to compete with students from other departments. So, it means you have to pay tuition and credit fees just like local students, right? Will it be a problem to you? ”, professor asked with a heavy tone. We were  numb, could not say anything. “Yes, Professor”, we finally managed to make a sound, almost unheard. That awkward moment lasted for quite a while. We knew that it was not easy for him to tell us the bad news. I tried to calm myself down, while trying to calculate the amount of money we had to pay with that type of scholarship. I was not yet done when my head started to blink dizzy seeing the huge numbers.

“I tried so hard to defend you before the scholarship committees, telling them how hard it is for you to study in bilingual programs, and how hard it is to have high grades in our department. I tried my best, but your grades are intolerable. I’m sorry”.

Is it not enough to be ambarrassed by my grade of 2 out of 100? Is it not enough that I have to retake the course again? Must that score make my life even harder here in this country? I was so depressed, torn into pieces. And still, life must go on.

Counting while counting, we had to drop some courses to reduce our financial burden to pay for the credit fees. It meant that we might take longer to graduate since we had to accomplish 43 credits in two years, way more than the credit requirements in other master programs. To make it worse, we could only apply scholarship in two years. If we could not manage to finish in time, we would have to pay everything ourselves. In that semester, we had to pay about NTD 45.000 each, approximately IDR 18.000.000 by then. Where to find such a big amount of money? School was getting harder, part-time working was nearly impossible, WHAT TO DO???

My tears were flowing on our way back to our room after the meeting with professor. Does it have to be this painful to fight for those dreams? Is it this heavy to be a poor struggling for those dreams? Why not just going back to Indonesia? I got a Bachelor degree, and I could just have found a job. A litte despair tempted me.

No, I am not going home. Those dreams already entered my soul too far, and I really love those dreams. I told myself that I was a warrior, who only comes back home for two reasons: winning or dying. I was not dying, I was not yet winning, so I had to keep fighting till I win. Till I reach that place. This is just the beginning to that place. I found my strength again in those tears.

Where there is a will, there is a way, that’s what I knew. I decided to borrow money from some friends who were more fortunate than me in getting our government scholarship. I borrowed NTD 42.000,- from three friends, an amount that was not little to me. Our earnings from working in the farm was not enough to support our life, we still had to borrow some more from some other friends.

I and Dori decided to live an extremely efficient life. We only ate vegetables and sweet potatoes. Sometimes we bought fruits if they’re on sale.  We did not eat rice at all. Cos if we cooked rice, we had to prepare at least some chicks, some piglets, or some calves with it. hahaa it. They were way too expensive for us. Boiling sweet potatoes or vegetables was not only cheaper, but also healthy and practical. We had to learn to allocate our time wisely, we had to work harder. We got used to sleeping only two or three hours per day. We did not want our experience in the previous semester to occur again.

We also learned to manage our finance better. Even though it came from loan, I allocated my money into five posts: 10% tithe, 50% monthly consumption, 20% savings, 10% social expenses and 10% for precautionary saving. That’s how it worked, even though I had much debt, I was still able to treat some friends, sending some gifts for my newborn nephews, even to travel J. Of course, it’s not because I was rich! I had nearly IDR 20 millions debt at 24. What kind of girl has such a huge debt? J I just wanted to enjoy every moment in my life, either sweet or bitter. Debt should not be a reason to miss the beauty of life, poverty should not be a reason to not socialize. Life must go on normally despite the debt and poverty.

We tried to rise from all our mess in the first semester. After realizing how hard our life was in that year, the chairman of our department decided to take over us, offering us the opportunity to work for him and be advised by him throughout our study. We were under his strict control starting from the second semester. Yeah, that’s true, he grilled us. Hahaa. Every week we had a two hours meeting. In every meeting, each of us had to present a paper. Oo… Not usual papers, but those published in reputable international journals, those I had never encountered during my previous studies. Actually, not only presenting them, but also mastering all the calculations involved in every paper. We had to be able to explain all the equations, the details and the intuitions. Exactly, just like chickens! We many times found ourselves as confused idiots before our professor when he commanded us to perform a calculation or to prove a result on the board. He would be very mad at us when we failed to derive, integrate, operate, or perform complex surgery on the equations in the paper. Hahaaa. Well, we knew that many times he was annoyed with how stupid we were at that level of education. Ah, how can Economics be so mathematical? That’s unfair. It’s too hard..

Actually, I needed at least one month to master an easy low-level paper. But our professor only gave us one week to read, calculate, understand, prepare the slides and get ready for presentation, for extremely hard papers. At the same time, I still had to do other subjects that I was taking that semester which were not less hard. I barely had time just to breathe. With my low mathematical ability, I actually deserved to be treated like a primary school student by our professor. Behind his frequent anger, we were aware of his desire for us to be our best. I personally was really grateful (I still am) for having the opportunity to be advised by a well respected professor in our field.  Even though he was so tough, I truly felt he was treating us as his children, like our fathers who sometimes punish us.

Honestly, I pretty much enjoyed the tiredness of our second semester. Through the papers that we presented in our meeting, I started to understand the suffs that we learned in the first semester, the application of the theories and concepts which were weird and unfamiliar to me in the beginning.  The way our professor supervised us made us also strong and competitive in other subjects.  We started to follow through all the materials that our professors taught in other classes. And one thing that I realized, those presentations that our professor forced me to do in the weekly meeting really improved my English.

The second semester was almost done, we were busy with final project and term papers, summer holiday was approaching. It was the time for us to take a break and look back on the path that we passed through during the semester. It was so satisfying to get through everything with our best. And the best part, I could not believe what I saw when our final grades on that semester were posted. We got perfect grades, 4.5 out of 4.5, a number that I had never imagined, dreamed of, or expected. My gratitude was undescribable. All the pain and tiredness just paid off. I was speechless, I felt warm in my eyes, I was so moved. The tears and pain were so beautiful. The previous semester I shed tears for the lowest ever grade I had, that semester I cried for the highest ever grade I had in my academic life. I knew that the grade was going to deliver me a type A scholarship which would help me pay my debts.

Summer holiday we had to find another job, since a new government regulation was released, which prohibited us from working in the farm. We found a new job in a scrap storage house. Exactly, garbage recycling house. Our duty was to sort and separate the garbages according to their types: bottle, can, paper, plastics and other unrecyclable trash. We tried so hard to enjoy the job which was not easy. It was tiring during the summer with the dirt, bad smell and all the disgusting things coming from the rotten household garbages. We worked harder everytime we remembered the amount of salary we’re gonna earn. Unfortunately, it did not last long because we worked so fast, we finished sorting huge mountains of garbage in only 2 weeks. After that we tried to find another job but we did not find any. Okay, it was a time for us to take a rest and enjoy the rest of the holiday.

I already experienced the hardships of struggling for one year in Taiwan, it turned out that I managed to get through everything. Summer holiday was over, we had to go back to reality.  Joy beyond words, scholarship announcement was out, thanks God we got type A, the scholarship which exempted us from tuition and credit fees and gave a NTD 30000 of stipend for one semester. With a little more working, I could pay my debt. Not because of my strength, but God was working through the people around me. Every bitterness that I experienced boosted my courage to go further, striving for the dreams that are coming true. No more worries, no more fears.

Don’t be afraid to dream because you are poor, don’t be afraid to step out just because you’re not as intelligent as your friends. You are greater than what you can imagine. Dream no matter what, nothing that is impossible. I am poor and not intelligent. I have nothing but dreams and courage to fight for it. No matter how hard life beats me, I am not giving up until those dreams really come true.

When we fight, the nature will also fight with us. Just like what the father of Economics said about the invisible hands which push the market into equilibrium, that’s how we find help to reach our goals. When we are hit by the storm, down, and messed up, there will be those invisible hands which deliver us to our steady-state. I call those hands ‘God’.  Long way to go, I am not yet done. I realize that another bigger dream is knocking in my head. I have been through many difficulties in my journey towards those dreams, I walked through the hardships, and I conquered many challenges. And I believe I will conquer whatever is lying ahead. Yeah, this story is not yet done, I’ll be there soon. I’ll see you in the gate of success,  no, let’s walk into the success together.

Ps. Now the writer and her soul sister are now doing their PhD studies, please do pray for them J