Meet Michael de Graaff: Exchanged Student from the Netherlands

Michael (in the middle) in front of JF Square at UPH

Michael de Graaff was an exchanged student from Rotterdam University (RBS) who studied at UPH in January until May 2012. Here at UPH, Michael who was majoring in Management studied Principles of Marketing, Innovations, Brand and Image Management, Human Resources Management, and also Bahasa Indonesia.

At first, as a student of RBS, Michael was asked to study for one semester in the Asian country in order to get his Bachelor degree. Indonesia was his first option. Then there were three universities that went into his consideration. “Since my research resulted that UPH was the best quality university I chose this one, next to that my family lives in Jakarta & Bogor so I could visit them during the weekends,” told him. In addition, he also chose UPH because it offered biggest range of subjects.

Before he started his classes at UPH, he took a campus tour and was surprised of how huge the campus was. “The swimming pool, the fitness hall, the basketball court, all three were one of my personal interests and it was really cool that you can just make use of them all,” said him. Here Michael also experienced a multicultural learning process. “All lecturers have a whole different style of teaching, one is Chinese, the other one is from the Philippines and the third one for example from Indonesia itself. It is very cool to see the cultural differences,” he explained.

“UPH brought me a lot of advantages, first of all the knowledge of course! It is fun to study the subjects from another perspective, the lectures involves and pushes you into this and therefore you learn much easier,” he told about the benefits of learning at UPH. “I also made many new friends at UPH, eventually they might become important business partners so they are also part of my new Indonesian network,” he added.

Michael also shared about his future plan, “my future plans are not very clear yet, I am now focusing on Logistics but eventually I want to start my own business, therefore the management program which I followed at UPH is going to be very helpful in my future career, people in the Netherlands are always interested in Indonesian people and now I experienced it all, I can tell them everything about it!”

UPH Media Relations