UEC
First thing that I noticed when we arrived to the school was how thorough everything had been thought trough and how exhaustivly things had been arranged: every piece of paperwork that we had to fill out had been prepared by the school. The school staff worked very hard (they even seemed a bit nervous with the constant running around) to make everything as smooth and easy for us as possible. One of the biggest differences in studying methods in UEC compared to Estonia is the ratio between independent research and classes; here the postgraduate programme focuses mainly on your research but in Estionia its mostly classes. Here you have only one class per week and usually no or few homework (except for the Japanese language classes ofcourse, where there are terrible amounts of homework), in Estonia its atleast two classes per week and lots of homework and individual or team projects. Here the studying also seems to be quite focused on learning the facts, although there are very many very different teachers. The school is nice and because people in the International Office are so nice and helpful, knowing only little Japanese has never become an obstacle for doing something which helps a lot to get along here.