Going Abroad, But Where?

The Prerequisite of Making 3 Choices

Shortly after my IELTS score came out, I enrolled myself in an IISMA mentoring program that was held by IISMA Canterbury. Why their program in particular? My old friend Bagus, who had been an awardee to Canterbury the year prior, shared about the program in his IG story and I decided to register myself. In the program's first mentoring session, my mentor, Kak Maya, had outlined the essentials that I will have to prepare. Among them, the most important thing that I have to decide is my target university of choice.

When I first decided to apply for IISMA the month before, I already had a university in mind (that I'm not gonna disclose). But it was only during the aforementioned mentoring session with Kak Maya that I realized just how shaky the justification that I had in choosing that particular university. It was almost solely based on the courses available in that university, and I haven't even thoroughly examined the courses of the other universities.

Unfortunately, the IISMA universities list page is not really designed with assisting applicants in choosing university based on their courses. The site has no bird's-eye view of all of the universities and each of their courses. Of course one could copy paste the information of each universities into an Excel sheet, but that would be painstaking manual labor. More importantly, at that time (early January) the universities list had not been updated and thus doing so back then would be a fool's errand. Having to do the time-consuming process of moving the list manually into an Excel sheet after the updated list is released would greatly hinder the speed at which I come up with the 3 universities that I'm choosing as my destination candidate. All of what's been said in this paragraph (and more) is the reason why I decided to make the IISMA scraper.

While working on the scraper and waiting for the universities list to be updated, I also enrolled myself on another IISMA mentoring program held by StudentsCatalyst. There, I was mentored by the outstanding Kak Christou Imanuel. In one of the session, he told me in detail his rationale and chain of thought in choosing his university of choice (Leiden University). The reasoning and justification that he had poured into his essay on why he should be the one sent there was so convincing and so tailor-made to him that it was near unthinkable for anybody who read his essay to be pondering about sending someone else to Leiden. The gist of it was that he, as a law student who has a strong interest in international relation, needs to be in Leiden due to the university's strategic proximity to pivotal international institutions, which provide a lot of opportunities that perfectly fit his future career path.

The important lesson and his story on how to implement said lesson is what he drilled onto me and his other mentees. I took note of it and it became the principle that I hold dear when selecting my host universities of choice. Consequently, I had to look into myself and ask a handful of crucial things. Who am I? What's my branding? What's my career path? What do I need to realize said career path? Based on all of the previous questions, what do I want to get out of this program that I cannot already get from my home university (a holiday is not a satisfactory answer)? I concluded that what I wanted is management and business courses or programs, as well as tech events such as hackathons and tech conferences filled with the best and brightest in tech.

Nearing the end of January, the scraper had been completed and the universities list had been updated by IISMA. With just the press of a button and 20 minutes of my time, I could get an updated Google Sheet of all of the universities with each of their courses laid bare next to them. The selection process can now actually begin.

My Thought Process

First, I limited my selection to universities in North America and Europe (UK is included). This is just my personal preference. It's redacted from the server-side, do you think you're so clever? It's redacted from the server-side, do you think you're so

After that, I had to assess all of the courses of each universities that fell under the above criteria. As an informatics engineering student, my process for selecting the courses is quite peculiar. What I did was categorizing each courses into one of four categories (note that a course can also not fall under any one of the categories below):

1. Strong CS: computer science courses that I have not yet learned in ITB.

2. Weak CS: computer science courses that I have learned previously in ITB or CS courses that are easy peasy (e.g. introduction to programming).

3. Peripherally CS: courses that aren't necessarily computer science but is sorta kinda mayhaps related to it, such as management courses.

4. Other field of interest: courses that I would like to take even though it's not related to CS at all.

After I finished categorizing each of the courses and holistically seeing the distribution of those categories in each of the universities, I concluded that it's not at all realistic to expect a university to have four strong CS courses (four is the number of courses that an awardee is expected to take in their host university). Instead I concluded that for a university to be classified as having favorable and interesting courses, it must satisfy all of the following conditions:

1. There is at least one category 4 course.

2. Either there is at least one category 1 and one category 3 course or there is at least two category 3 course.

Using some spreadsheet engineering, I was able to filter out the universities that do not satisfy both of the conditions above.

Then, I manually checked the QS ranking of each of the university that have not yet been filtered out. Universities with QS ranking lower than ITB got filtered out. Next, I disregarded the universities with academic period that extends into February as it'll disrupt my 8th semester (I prefer to not have to deal with the ensuing bureaucratic mess).

Lastly, I did a deep dive into each of the cities and universities itself. This is where I held on to the principle I inherited from Kak Christou. As an informatics student, I decided that I can strongly utilize anything that is tech-related in the cities and universities as something that I could exploit for my own personal growth and benefit. Out of all of the universities that have been shortlisted, two stood out: University of Toronto and University of Manchester.

Toronto is often dubbed as the silicon valley of the north, as it is one of the center of Canada's tech industry (other than Vancouver and Montreal). As such, there is a lot of hackathon and tech conferences compared to other cities. The "techie-ness" is not just limited to the city but also to the university itself. UofT has embraced its role as the source of a lot of Canadian start-ups and as such, has held a lot of programs to accelerate and incubate them. For example, the University of Toronto Entrepreneurship. The Mississauga campus that I'll be attending should I be accepted also have a fintech club that I'm very much keen to join considering at this time I was an intern for paper.id, a tech company that is operating in the B2B fintech sector.

Almost all of the above can also be said for Manchester, which is one of the largest tech hub in the UK only second to London. Consequently, it's also one of the largest tech hub in the entirety of Europe.

In summary, the university selection consists of the following sequential phase:

1. Only North America and Europe (including the UK).

2. Favorable courses.

3. Better QS ranking than ITB.

4. Academic period that does not seep into my 8th semester.

5. Cities with a lot of activities that are relevant to my major.

In the aftermath of the above phases, I ended up choosing the following three universities:

1. University of Toronto.

2. University of Manchester.

3. Lancaster University.