Kansai Gaidai University

More freedom, want to have guests

The language courses are pretty dry but not that hard, as long as you study on your own. The business courses are a bitch so don't take them unless you need them for your major. The other humanities electives were pretty easy, just make sure you take the good ones. Hollstein, Paul Scott are two really cool teachers.

Not really. The classes were pretty easy so it was nice to have a kind of vacation semester when I was at Kansai Gaidai.

Most of the afternoon elective courses are a waste of time. A complete joke compared to classes at my home institution... Grading was very easy as expectations were so low. On the other hand, this was fine for the majority of students, since most of the foreign students at Kansai Gaidai are not very studious or that interested in anything other than getting drunk and trying to hook up with Japanese students. The Japanese courses definitely required more effort, but were basically drill-and-regurgitate type courses and most foreign students made little effort to practice Japanese outside of class.

Honestly, I think Kansai Gaidai is basically an ingenious scheme to draw English-speaking foreigners to Hirakata in large number so that the university can market itself and increase enrollment by Japanese students looking to better their English... very little thought seems to have been put into the curriculum for international students. This program needs to take itself more seriously for it to be of any intellectual value to those studying abroad there.