First thing in Belarus that was noticeable to me was the fact that how the weather is clean how green is this country. As I arrived in Minsk, a student from International Relation Office came to welcome me and he took me to the IRO for registration office and then took me to the dormitory and in the dorm, everything was already handled and they just gave me keys and student card and new bedsheets.
Belarussian people were speaking Russian. Most people couldn’t speak English but they had lots of patients and tried to be helpful to those who cannot speak Russian.
I was working at the Belarus State University which was a pretty old and of course a beautiful university. My tutor was a kind young man from the web department and he already knew my resume and talked to me about my interests and why I choose Belarus and what do I want to do. He once took me to a very big village which is now a museum and another time took me to a very big garden which used to be some rich man’s house. My tutor tried to help me a lot and help me when I had a question or problems.
My project was about making an exam system which instructor can define categories and exam with different number of questions and students by entering the test set name (which is already told them by the instructor) can answer the questions in the test set one by one and at the end, the results are available to the instructor and they can see the results on the web or export results in excel
I was alone in the room for a while but as new semester beginning, I see new people in the dormitory and of course in the room, when I left Belarus, I was a roommate with a person from Hungary, Russia, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Oman. I also met three other interns in the second week of my internship. They were from physics faculty, two of them were from Serbia and another one from Germany and after a while, I met their roommates as well and in the last two weeks, it was like we were a group of 6 which going out to eat together or see places every evening.
I do recommend for students to take this internship because in this internship I got lots of gains:
- Getting familiar with other people from other countries with different cultures.
- It was my first time going to another country all alone and I should have been responsible for lots of things like managing expenses
- Although I didn’t work in the working environment and I did my job with my laptop in the dorm, I saw how people in my major think about solutions.
Final words: taking this internship was a unique experience to me, it is like living with other students from another country, each one with a unique story of their own and work and learn and of course have fun together, make some international friends and improve your career.
So if someone has an opportunity to take this kind of internship, I would recommend to take it. It is not all about good things to happen, but it’s the combination of good times and hard times that makes a valuable experience.
Written By: Yashar Nesabian
Tarbiat Modares University – Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering