National Tsing Hua University was a university I actually had targeted to start my socio- cultural anthropology career.

When I got in and spent recent few years than I know that it is really great university with nice libraries and huge beautiful campus. Also, I could say the same about the Department of Anthropology – it has very good academic support, highly professional faculty and nice library, big classes and other facilities which are in general all up to mark. And besides all formal and informal help and supportive attitude of Department faculty, another remarkable thing is financial support that NTHU and the Department of Anthropology have provided (which included scholarships and financial assistance for periods of practice and fieldwork). By the time I decided to apply NTHU Department of Anthropology, I already was an “Oriental studies trained” guy who had been looking for doing anthropology. That’s the main reason why I chose Taiwan, and especially NTHU. One of the main interesting things for me is that the language of instruction is Chinese. Actually, when I started my MA program here, I realized that we would have to read a lot of material in English, and discuss it in Chinese. That experience of shifting between languages was very valuable, challenging and interesting for me. Additionally, most of professors speak fluent English, which gives international students the possibility to discuss and understand the most problematic issues (though, most of my classmates are Taiwanese). Also, it gives nice opportunity to those international students who still want to learn anthropology here, but doesn’t have an appropriate level of Chinese.

What about studying process…Well, sometimes it was bloody hard, and sometimes it was just nice. The first year was crammed with a lot of thoughts and great range of emotions (from really nice feelings of first successes to very disgusting ones of being knocked out). One of the most difficult parts for me as an international student (who was a beginner in anthropology) was to learn anthropological theory through the prism of foreign languages, but at the same time it was very useful and valuable practice. At last, but not least, I recommend all potential prospective students to consider NTHU Department of Anthropology as one of the best choices, and I’d like to say that it’s an honor for me to study here, and I’m glad that I’ve been granted the nice chance to learn all those things I didn’t know before.

Maksim Groza 2012/ 12/ 12