Studying in Bratislava (part I)
Published on
Author: Joco Todorovski
The story about me studying here is closely connected with Mladiinfo. I applied for Sweden, but I didn’t get the full scholarship so I was kind of disappointed because my best friend and my best colleague got the scholarship and they were about to leave and study abroad. My best friend was encouraging me to apply to other open calls but I was not interested because I already started to develop different projects in Macedonia. So one morning, (it was Saturday) he woke me up and said to check my FB mail because he sent a message to me that there is an open call for studying in Slovakia. I opened my inbox and there was a Mladiinfo’s regular newsletter. I laughed and thought he was crazy when I saw the deadline – it was till Wednesday 5pm, which meant I had two and a half working days. I said that I had doubts that this was a “clean deal”, saying that it was announced late because there are probably admitted participants, and that this is just a public stunt. To cut the long story short, I activated my whole family to gather the necessary documents, because at that time I lived in Skopje, but coming from another city, and – in the end I got the scholarship.
The program
Currently I’m enrolled in a one-year preparation program of Slovak language and I also have some introductory courses such as Mathematics, Economy and English. After that I will pursue my Master’s degree at the Comenius University. The program is conducted in an institution called UJOP which stands for Institute of Language and Academic Preparation for Foreign Students, a division of the Comenius University. This program was created for foreign students to introduce them into Slovak language as such over the course of one year, but contains also other courses to learn Slovak terminology in their field of specialization. First we started with the Slovak language and then, as soon as we learned the basics of the language, based on our field of further academic education, we were divided into groups which took some additional courses. We study in groups of around 12 people, which is good because the professor is devoted to the students more directly. There are around 60 students from Macedonia, Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Armenia, Albania, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Serbia and Moldova. (huh, I think I got them all J). The classes are from 8:30am – 4:30pm and we have examinations almost every week which is a preparation for the first round of testing in January and the second one, which is in May. Studying there is not hard and at the beginning it was fun because there were different languages to be heard in one place. Every day seems like a cocktail party, since you can always hear a mix of English, Spanish, Slovak and Russian. In February, we will apply for the faculties and hopefully, until August we will have been admitted.
Read the full article