What am I doing in Budapest? …I’m an overseas student

Anh is meeting her 20-year-old Vietnamese boyfriend round the corner opposite to Budapest’s City Park (Városliget), just off the stop of the old-fashioned electric bus that still patrols the old and sometimes cobbled streets of Budapest’s 13th and 7th districts. The areas are now boasting soaring real estate prices but looking around the local supermarkets, where the unemployed still find their daily supply of bottled spirits, one would say that nothing has changed since the 90’s, the original rough era of post-communism.

Penh is from Vietnam, and she is studying food engineering in her second year at university in Hungary. She likes her student life here and enjoys what the city has to offer, with her friends. Still, when her exams and in-course assessments are taking place, it is hard to move around – a lot of these studies can be very demanding for the students living abroad and studying in English, a foreign language to most of them. Furthermore, in a country where the requirements can be a lot more fact-based and less practical and less student friendly. Current international traditions of teaching tend to put more emphasis on case-studies and problem-solving, whereas, in Central Europe they typically need students to know more facts and information out of context. The teaching and lecturing methods are changing though not the least because overseas students in Budapest are highly lucrative for universities.

Money comes only as one of the benefits foreign students bring to the capital – they diversify student life here and provide a potential professional work force.

Anh is only one of the thousands of foreign students in various courses living here. They are typically studying medicine and engineering in English, and plan to take their degrees on to their new country of destination or back to Asia or Africa. As a result, not many make considerable efforts to learn the otherwise rather strange Hungarian language. This is very often a hindrance to them. Getting to know the local culture and integrating more fully in student culture here, according to Don, who originally came from Uganda to study in Hungary in the early 2000’s, and now lives in London and working in hotel management there, earning over 25K a year. He was previously fully integrated into Budapest’s student and social life though. His Hungarian is fluent and enjoys speaking it. He considers language the main reason why foreign students do not fully integrate. He agrees that Budapest has now become a very appealing capital city and student destination with lots to offer to anyone moving here.

The move is not overly smooth though, no matter how appealing. Fees for foreign students are over £5000 a year, not including accommodation and other expenses. Luckily, families do not need to come up with more than one year’s fees at a time and even the first year’s fees can be paid upon arrival. Proof of funds, however, is necessary before relocation as well as evidence of money for one’s sustenance. This is no small sum in most places outside Europe but ‘’there are ways around it’’ says Patricia in a Civil Engineering course from East Africa. ‘’You can just make the funds available for a couple of weeks’’ she says.