Julia Tong (B.LA III): Exchange in Melbourne School of Design

Every semester, a group of our NUS DoA students relocate themselves in other top architecture schools all across the world, exchanging cultures, experiences and learning through the Student Exchange Program. Concurrently, students from these schools congregate within NUS DoA, enriching not only their education but also exposing our students to a greater diversity of contexts and progressive ideas about contemporary architecture and cities. Hear about their invaluable experiences, firstly from Julia Tong (B.LA III) who is currently on exchange in The Melbourne School of Design.

Melbourne has been my home for the past 5 months and it is an experience that I will never get again in my life. The journey didn’t start off as shaky as I expected thanks to the great roommates I met before the trip and to the good friends that I made along the way which made the journey smooth. I love the atmosphere of the city; the pace of life is comfortable and sometimes it does get a little bit crazy but that is what makes Melbourne unique. I managed sneak in time to escape from the city as well to explore different parts of Australia. I’m really satisfied with all the things that I’ve done so far and will miss Melbourne once I’m on my return flight back home.

As someone who always stays cooped up in my own room to work on assignments, the exchange gave me the opportunity to go out of my comfort zone. There is such an extensive list of things to do in Melbourne and around Victoria that I can’t possibly stay in my apartment. I grew to be more confident in trying new things. I’d be hesitant to try clubs at NUS but at Unimelb, the students whom I encountered during the Clubs Expo were so friendly and welcoming they managed to convince me to join a club! I was lucky to join the softball club before the season was over and the best part was that I was able to participate in training and games whenever I wanted knowing how busy a design student’s schedule can be. I also became more independent over living apart from my family and dealt with stress myself while being the sole design student from Singapore on this exchange. Without this exchange, I don’t think my character would have developed in such a positive way.

One of my initial ideas for my exchange program was to do a different curriculum from NUS BLA to gain better insight as a designer. I shifted away from NUS BLA’s ecology-oriented classes to urban design-oriented classes at MSD and is a decision I don’t regret. I didn’t expect to be learning ecology during design studio, so it was a plus. It’s the first time having a multi-disciplinary curriculum. At the beginning of this exchange, I knew nothing about Melbourne and I was not prepared to design a city that is 14 times bigger or even the state that is 318 times bigger than Singapore. I was working on city scale and state-wide scale simultaneously. Fortunately, my urban design lecturers are equipped to fill me in on the details about Melbourne pretty quickly and studio on the other hand taught me more advanced ArcGIS skills to make the idea of designing for Victoria’s High Speed Rail to be less daunting. Learning the internal schemes of the city and the natural environment of Victoria truly broadened the scope of my design knowledge and capability to work at an unimaginable scale.

However, I miss the food back home. Food always tastes good from the place of origin. I glad I didn’t give in to my cravings yet and will look forward to eating all the dishes once I return. I do miss my classmates and professors back in NUS and I also do miss doing welfare work with TAS (The Architecture Society). There’s plenty of design clubs at Unimelb but I can’t join permanently if I wanted to. I look forward to catching up with all the things I miss back in NUS once the new semester begins.

All images and photographs credited to Julia Tong.