Evans Odoli Anjala from Kenya -2013 admission

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. My traveling to Japan offered me a chance to read some of the most exciting pages of this book. Particularly, joining the International Course Program has been a once in a lifetime opportunity for me to read more of its pages than I can count. Actually each day in this course seems like a journey, one filled with new experiences enriched by the diversity that our world boasts of.
Meeting people from different corners of the globe has helped me appreciate diversity. It is not just the students who are drawn from far and wide, but the faculty as well come from different continents. My faculty for instance hail from Peru, across Europe, all the way to Ukraine. This makes learning fun in that, each professor often adds interesting stories about their home countries that helps you see the same knowledge from new perspectives that you would not have imagined of before. Through them, my mind has traveled to many places and picked new ideas.
Once in a while, I get a chance to visit a new place in Japan. I have been to the bustling city of Osaka in some of its shopping districts like Umeda, Namba, Nipponbashi and the famous arcade of Shinsaibashi Suji. I have also been to the port city of Kobe where I found the Kobe harbor land to be the best place to experience Japanese culture.
Recently, I was in Nagasaki, a city in the southern island of Kyushu. Perhaps this old city, formerly the commercial centre of trade between Japan, Korea and China, is known by many by the dark history it underwent during the Second World War. I first heard of Nagasaki while a young boy in history class. Then, I could only imagine of how terrible it was for that city far away in the East. But now here I was, standing exactly at the site where the atomic bomb exploded. Then this odd feeling just crept in me, “what if suddenly the clock is reversed 68 years back!” I think I grew this fear after emotionally watching inside the museum the images being flashed on screens of the piteous conditions underwent by the victims. It was so sad that I hope no place on earth will be subjected down this path again.
Nevertheless, my most interesting experience was the “Ten million dollar night view”. I was shocked to learn that Nagasaki has one of the best three nightscapes in the world.
As they say, a journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. What I value most are the friends I have made as I journey through this course, more so that I’m interacting with a mix of various cultures. Like this semester I was glad to be working on a report for group presentation in Culture class with exchange students from Canada, UK, Netherlands & Israel. Working with them was interesting as everyone brings to the table new ideas of the same subject as perceived in their own cultures.
I have learned not just what people in different parts of the world do, but why they do them tied to their cultural backgrounds. Such knowledge will help me to become a better global citizen. I think with the on-going technological developments, our globe is about to become even smaller and as such it requires of us to be global citizens who can understand each other and work together in solving challenges of today. Indeed, there wouldn't have been a better place to poise myself towards this than studying the ‘International’ Course of ‘Global Engineering’.