My Road to Yokohama National University, Japan (Thanks for World Bank Scholarship and my department and my dearest family)

After enrolling into the Yokohama National University (YNU), I would like to share the 1 of the scholarship info from World Bank/YNU. (Yes, there are MANY scholarship throughout the world by WB, more info can refer here ) Precisely, I am taking the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program (JJ/WBGSP). Here is the brief about JJ/WBGSP (2017) :-

The Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program (JJ/WBGSP) is open to women and men from developing countries with relevant professional experience and a history of supporting their countries’ development efforts who are applying to a master degree program in a development-related topic.   

JJWBGSP offers scholarships for over 200 Preferred Programs (.xlsx 49 KB) spanning a wide array of development topics and for 14 Partner Programs (.xlsx 15 KB)  at universities in U.S., Africa and Japan in key areas of development, including economic policy management, tax policy, and infrastructure management.  JJWBGSP scholarships for developing country nationals are not available for any other master degree program.

A JJWBGSP scholarship provides tuition, a monthly living stipend, round-trip airfare, health insurance, and travel allowance.

For the past 1 year, I was very aggressive in applying oversea scholarship for the Master graduate program as there is budget constrain from the department and I have to take my own initiative. To my surprise, there are many scholarship for the graduate (Master/ PhD) program.

Thanks to Google, I manage to found this program, Master in Infrastructure Management @ Yokohama National University. (IMP - Infrastructure Management Program)

I applied this IMP scholarship on January of 2017. I have applied many scholarship before and this is the only university request the application to post the hardcopy forms rather than online application.

The due date was end of February 2017. There is 2 selections process. 1st screening by the YNU 20 candidates will be recommended to the WB and WB will finalize the last 10 finalists. I am lucky enough to become the finalist. (Something weird to me is there is NO INTERVIEW/ Teleconference being conducted during the process which I had few teleconference interviews for other oversea scholarship.) 

After the the YNU 1st screening, the last 20 candidates will receive another link from WB to fill the form online, again. (a long form within some personal statements required)

Once getting the offer letter from WB (ohhhhh yessss... I am lucky enough), I had written to my department to apply the study leave and it was granted. My biggest concern/dilemma was my family constrain..sob..sob..no more elaboration here~

Today is the 2nd week in Yokohama, still adapting after getting a total culture shock here~ Perhaps will share more after this.

Here are some pictures :-

Get ready for the departure from KLIA, Malaysia. The departure was late due to bad weather (raining) and missed my planned connection flight (From Osaka to Haneda airport) . Luckily was reimbursed free due to the Airline fault and manage to catch up another flight just an hour later~

YNU Entrance Ceremony

 International Student Lounge @ YNU

 Registration to the Yokohama City Hall and national health insurance

 

 At the campus

 My hostel, Ooka International Residence

 The walking route to YNU from the nearest subway (eki in Japanese)

 Wefie at the 1 of the graduate school

 Gumyoji post office. (to pay our student insurance. so many insurances in Japan)

Student welcome party. Like a mini UN gathering.