Discount, Discount, and More Discounts!

In my last blog as an IMFSE blogger, I want to share my tips of living “frugally” as the saying goes:

“He who will not economize will have to agonize” -Confucius

This list only covers some of the discounts you can get during your study/travel in Europe as an IMFSE student.

ESN (Erasmus Student Network) Card

This card allows you to get reduced price for ESN parties and activities. For those of you starting in Ghent, they have so many activities like karaoke, board game party, and so on. It will also give you discount for flights with Ryanair including one free checked in baggage. It’s a must have for an Erasmus student especially if you like travelling and partying.

ISIC Card

Similar to ESN card, ISIC card is also a student card which is recognized internationally and can give you discounts in many restaurants. Additionally, this card also provides you access to student price on STA Travel. For example, I once bought a return ticket back home to Indonesia for 400ish pounds while the normal return ticket price was around 550ish pounds (from Edinburgh). You can buy this card the same time as you buy the flight ticket with STA Travel, so, no rush!

Flixbus

Travelling in Europe is easier compared to travelling in Indonesia because you can take the train or bus to other cities/countries while back in Indonesia we mostly will travel by plane. Using Flixbus to travel around Europe will be a cheaper option. Moreover, they also have a cheaper option of buying 5 trips for 99 euro. This will be beneficial of course when your route costs more than 20 euro (and this can be shared with your travel mates!). ESN card is also said to have partnership with Flixbus so you can get more discount by using ESN card! But remember to check the Terms and Conditions before you buy anything.

Youth transportation price for SNCB

If you want to travel from/to Ghent, you will need to take a bus/train trip to Brussels Airport and it will cost you 9 euro per trip. The good news is, if you are < 26 years old, you can get discount per trip. Moreover, if you want to travel around Belgium, you can also make use of the weekly or seasonal ticket with bigger discounts! Unfortunately I was older than 26 when I first arrived in Belgium and I couldn’t use this price. For more information you can visit their website here.

I believe you can still find many “tricks” like this during your study. Enjoy your holiday and Happy New Year 2020!

See Ya Later

It’s been quite a strange feeling recently. A semester of intense classes culminated in our final exam a little over a week ago; quite possibly the last exam of its kind many of us will sit.

After three semesters of studying together across Europe, and all of the out of class socialising and travelling that goes along with that, the eight of us on this pathway are splitting up for our thesis’. Maryam and Fearghal are going back to Ghent, Tanja and I are returning to Lund, Laura is staying on in Edinburgh, Chamith will be heading back to Zurich after his summer internship there, Waqas is off to my homeland in Queensland and if the information black hole that is Leo’s US visa application gets granted he’ll be off to Maryland. We’ve all known this for quite some time, but it wasn’t until we were having lunch together after that last exam that the reality of it sunk in.

It feels like yesterday that we all met back in Ghent, full of nerves and anticipation. As I wrote in my first blog post, the challenges and sacrifices that we’ve all made so that we can undertake this ambitious IMFSE program forged our bonds almost immediately. We all came from a place of mutual understanding, and despite all of our ambition it never got competitive regarding class rank. We all had different skills, backgrounds, and abilities which everyone could learn from.

Whilst we still have a challenging few months ahead of us, the end is in sight. This week of farewells almost feels like practice for what will come after graduation. However, if the years of students ahead of us are anything to go by, it will be more ‘see ya later’ than ‘goodbye’.

Similarly, it’s see you later from me as I’ll be hanging up the keyboard with this blog post. Thanks for indulging me in sharing my perspectives and hopefully I’ve been able to provide some insights into the IMFSE experience.

Communication as a Fire Safety Engineer

Communication is probably the most important soft skill an engineer can possess. Engineering doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and engineers need to be able to communicate with their colleagues, customers and the public. This is especially so in fire safety engineering due to the variety of backgrounds we all have, and the multi-disciplinary nature of the work. Being able to succinctly and coherently express complex technical phenomena is vital no matter where you end up in the industry.

However, communication isn’t limited to just the technical aspects. I think we’ve all experienced the struggle to find exactly the right words when first asked “what does a fire safety engineer do?”. There just isn’t a short statement appropriate for all that many other engineering fields have like “I design bridges” etc. (If you think you’ve got one, please comment below). The good thing about IMFSE is that as we’re constantly meeting new people at each university we attend we all have plenty of opportunities to practice.

Like with any skill you don’t get better at it without practicing. One current student who did just that is Laura, who spent some time during the summer holidays speaking at the Advanced Composites in Construction (ACIC) in Birmingham. Laura was presenting some of the research work she assisted with at the University of Queensland just prior to joining IMFSE. The research consisted of a series of fire tests on a material composed of timber veneer and layers of woven glass fibers, both embedded in epoxy.

Laura was the only fire safety engineer presenting at the three-day ACIC conference and I can only assume most likely the only fire safety engineer in attendance. Presenting technical fire engineering research to a room full of people from many backgrounds with a varying awareness of fire safety engineering is a challenge. However, Laura successfully navigated this and was awarded first prize in the Early Career Researcher Poster Competition. Congratulations Laura!

The more we communicate about our work and roles with audiences of all backgrounds, including the general public, the stronger the fire safety engineering industry will become.

Visa Application Experience

As I mentioned before in my previous blog, I’ll share the good and bad experience I and my IMFSE friends encountered while applying for visa. Being an Erasmus student from a non-EU country is always attached to visa application as the duration given is usually 1 semester only. But don’t you worry because if you have the acceptance letter and the scholarship letter from IMFSE, the visa application should be piece of cake! Since I did my visa application for 1st and 3rd semesters in Indonesia, the requirements mentioned here might be different to other countries.

1st Semester – UK Visa to Edinburgh

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At that time, I was planning to visit Schengen zone before going to UK so I need TWO different visas for those two neighboring areas! With only 1 month in hand, I immediately looked for plane tickets for both applications and dealt with the process straightaway – first submitting for tourist Schengen visa, and then UK short term visa. I’ll just skip the schengen part because it’s a tourist visa.

The schengen visa took more or less 3 weeks in total from booking an appointment until I had my passport back and while I was waiting, I completed the UK visa requirements which are:

1. Plane ticket from Schengen area to UK
2. Accommodation for the whole duration of stay
3. Printed bank account for 6 months*
4. Letter from the bank stating that our account is not blocked or frozen*
5. Translated and legalised diploma and transcript of records
6. Acceptance letter from IMFSE
7. English certificate (TOEFL or IELTS)

*point 3 and 4 could be replaced with scholarship letter from IMFSE but I had those documents ready just in case.

After getting my Schengen visa, I immediately went to UK embassy to submit all the documents. As I only had 1 week, I chose the express visa application (more ££ of course) because it would only take them 2-3 days to finish. The bad thing about this was that they didn’t notify me when the visa was done, so I needed to go to ask them personally on the third day to get my visa. But everything went well so I didn’t complain 😁

2nd Semester – Swedish Visa

This is by far the easiest visa I’ve ever done in my life! Thank you Sweden! 🇸🇪

The step was very clear, we just applied online to their website, filling all the details about us and our programme, and waited until they emailed back to us saying that the process was done. Please be noted that, for us, the application needed to be done not more than 3 months before your arrival date to Sweden (except you’re a scholarship holder << this was stated in their website, please recheck when you do your application). After receiving the email, you can go to the nearest Swedish embassy to get your biometrics taken and later your permit card will be mailed to your address.

For people from certain countries, you don’t need to have biometrics before coming to Sweden. You can just show your acceptance email from the embassy while entering Sweden, and later do the biometrics in Malmö, a city close to Lund. For those of you who need to have biometrics (you can see the list here),  please proceed…

For us in Edinburgh, we needed to go to London for biometrics and luckily for us, the FSE day was in London so we could do the biometrics before the FSE day to avoid having 2 trips back and forth to London (unless you want to travel there again at a later date). For some of us in Ghent, they needed to go to Paris for biometrics as there was no Swedish consulate in Belgium (Thanks to Waqas for sharing this with me). Don’t forget to bring all the uploaded documents! Then, we just needed to wait until the card arrived. As simple as that!

3rd and 4th semester – Belgian Visa

If you want to do it while in Sweden, you’ll need to apply it online and later do the biometrics in Helsinki, Finland. Apart from your regular supporting documents (scanned passport, acceptance letter and stuff) you will also need these documents:

1. Notarized medical certificate and X-ray to prove that you don’t have Tuberculosis.
2. Police certificate

You can do medical certificate and x-ray in Malmo with an appointment at least 1 week in advance. After all the check ups, you will get this certificate straight away. For the police certificate, you can do it online and they will mail you the certificate in 3 to 4 weeks. After having all the documents, apply for the visa online and go to Helsinki in person to get the biometrics and the visa. (Thanks to Daniel Fogerty for sharing this info)

For me, as I applied for the visa in Indonesia, Belgian visa required more or less similar documents as UK visa. But I couldn’t use my legalised documents for UK visa since the legalisation stamps were valid for 3 months only so I needed to redo all the documents legalisation thing again. The only difference was that it required a legalised police record.

I thought having 1.5 months for this visa application was more than enough as I did two in 1 month for the 1st semester. But I couldn’t be more wrong! I managed to finish all the legalisations in 3 weeks and that gave me 3 weeks left to do the visa process. Usually it only takes 1 week to finish, but the guy in the Belgian Embassy did something wrong that made my visa process delayed and eventually I just received the visa 3 days before my departure date.

In conclusion, it’s always better to do the visa application far before your departure date as you won’t know what will happen with your application. Good luck!!

Post-exam Celebration!

Finally! Exams and assignments are all done! After a long and hectic month, we are finally able to relax a little bit at least until the marks are published. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the holiday!

We survived this month!

The day after the last exam, which was 21 December, the bois went to O’Learys to have dinner and play some games there to celebrate the end of exam period. It was so surprising that a big game center like that only cost 10 euro per hour for pool table and the shuffleboard game – relatively cheap for a good place to hang out! We also found an air hockey table for 4 people but unfortunately the table didn’t work so we skipped that game and moved to the pool table.

Broken air hockey table

Pool table time!

Here, Balsa and Rey dominated the game as they were so good at playing pool while I and Karim were good at putting the white ball in the hole ☹. Look at how the Serbian Champ play in this video.

After we finished the 1-hour duration, we moved to shuffleboard table which I haven’t even played before. The gameplay is simple though, it’s similar to curling but not with circular target, it’s a horizontal line with points. If our pucks stays in the point zone, at the end of the game, we gain points based on the amount of pucks in certain zone. In the first half an hour, we were still trying to adjust our power and accuracy but in the second half, the game turned to a competitive game.

First, Balsa and I got our comeback by scoring 4 points when we were 1 point behind vs Rey and Fuen. Later, in the other game, I and Karim got a comeback again vs Balsa and Rey after knocking 2 of their pucks out of the 3 point zone and making us scored 6 points instead at our last turn. Look how happy Karim was at that time!

Balsa scoring 4 points

Look how happy he was!

Our last game scoring 6 points

What a night it was! We’re also planning to go there again next time and we hope a bigger company later to make it even better! Congrats to both 1st year and 2nd year students who have survived this semester in Ghent. Good luck in the next semester and see you on Fire Safety Day!