Pre-Departure Obligations and Bureaucracy

Registration to UofT and Course Selection

Me, Azza, Vanya, and Michelle (hereby will be referred to as "we") received information about registration to the UofT in early April, shortly after we got accepted into the IISMA program. We only had to fill in our information, identifying documents such as passport, etc. to be enrolled into the university system and receive our university email. We finished that process sometime around May. So it's pretty neat being able to use the UofT Zoom account even before we got to UofT (since the generated meeting link has a utoronto domain which I think is a flex). We also got to meet Andrew, the person who works at the International Education Centre (IEC), through Zoom to receive some briefings and explanation about how UTM (University of Toronto Mississauga) will be like and the immigration process.

Included in the registration process was for us to choose the courses that we'd like to take during the upcoming semester. We first had to submit a document outlining all of the courses that we have taken in our home university as well as their respective descriptions. This document is going to be used to assess whether or not we'll be allowed to take the courses that we later apply for.

What I love the most was the fact that there are very little limit on the course option that we're allowed to take. We were handed the UofT course builder that included all of the courses in all three campuses. From the course builder, we then listed ten courses that we'd like ordered by preference. Andrew will then go through our list from top to bottom asking the department that holds the course whether or not we'll be allowed to be enrolled into the course. Once the list is exhausted or there have been five courses that are approved (because five is the maximum number of course that an inbound exchange semester student could take) he'll stop and we'll be enrolled in the approved courses.

Because there are very few limits on the courses that we can at least apply for, the four of us applied for courses that are wholly different from the courses that we listed when we registered for IISMA initially. My intention was to take a mixture of computer science, business, and management courses. I had to look through more than a dozen of courses and each of their syllabus to really make a decision in building my list of 10 courses. Later, I was initially approved for four courses and waitlisted for several others. The four courses that I was approved to take was a mixture of computer science (one) and business/ management (three).

The IISMA course list is honestly misleading because we are not limited to that list at all in the courses that we could take. The four of us ended up taking very different courses compared to the one that was in that list.

The Anti-Climactic Visa Process

It's really simple honestly. You just need to make an application and put in your documents through the IRCC portal, get to the visa processing centre to get your biometric data taken, and then get to the visa processing centre once more to receive the visa that has been stamped to one of your passport's page.

Pre-Departure Series and Sekolah SR

The Pre-Departure Series is essentially a series of webinar taking place between May and June that all awardees must attend. The Sekolah SR is the same thing but only for the SRs and co-SRs and held after the Pre-Departure Series in July.

I have to be completely honest, for the most part only the Pre-Departure Series that talked about the obligations and paperworks that must be taken care of by each IISMA awardees is really useful. Most of the other ones talked about lessons that I kind of already know and understand because I already received it beforehand somewhere else. And I think most awardees should feel the same. What I'm saying is that they could probably cut down the amount of Pre-Departure Series by half with very few negative effects. The same could also be said about the Sekolah SR.

SDG Challenge

The SDG challenge is one of the challenge that must be completed as an IISMA awardee. In it, awardees get placed in groups of 10-11 awardees that is not segregated by region nor by the type of awardee (one group would likely be filled with both vocational and undergraduate awardees). The group must make a content that talks about a particular SDG goals that has been assigned to them. I took charge as the head of content writer for my group with three people as the writer. I came up with the idea for the content, structured the content and divided it up to each of the writers, and then proofread their work. We reached our engagement goal that was set by IISMA and there's fortunately not that many slackers in our group.

Where Should We Live?

We initially thought that it's probably better (and cheaper) for us to live by ourselves off-campus in a house that we rent together, or if not possible we could still just live off-campus. We even got some information from the Indonesian students at UofT (thank you so much Imanuel!) on the Indonesian diaspora that usually have contacts for house renting and whatnot. As the SR, I always nudged our region coordinator for renting our own place during progress meeting. But it later turned out that in the agreement between IISMA and UofT, we'll have to stay on-campus.

The fact that we have to live on-campus spelled certain financial problems if we don't choose the dorm correctly. For one, this means that on top of the dorm itself, we'll also have to pay for the campus's meal plan. Moreover, UTM has several on-campus dorms to choose from and most of their cost actually exceeds or gets too close to our monthly allowance from IISMA. So, we had to specifically request to IISMA that then passes our request to UofT that we want a specific dorm, Erindale Hall, that not only costs the cheapest, but also comes with a common kitchen in each unit. The kitchen is particularly important because it allows us to cook for ourselves, saving us a large amount of money.

Planning of Culturise

It's gonna be an additional challenge on its own to hold the Culturise challenge with only four people. That is why we decided to open the recruitment for external organizers. We primarily targeted Indonesian students who went to UofT or other universities in the area. We first had to design a brief terms of reference explaining who we are and what the event is about, before broadcasting it to the several Indonesian students association in Toronto such as Permikato, UTISA, and ISA UTM.

Merch and Banner

The merch that we decided to make was pretty simple. It wasn't a piece of clothing like a hoodie or a shirt or a jacket. Instead, we just made a pin 10 centimeters in diameter that has the name of the university mascot (True Blues) plus each of our spirit animal (mine is an owl!). The spirit animal that we sort of made for this pin ended up being used in social media posts and our IISMA banner.

We decided to have that instead of clothes because we could wear a pin on top of any clothes that we wear. Moreover, if it was a piece of clothing, it would be unlikely to be worn considering the coldness of Canada.