I was chosen for Global Professional Programme (GPP) last April. GPP is offered to university students around the world and provides them with basic business knowledge such as communication skills, telephone skills, presentation skills, etc… It strongly encourages us to build confidence in learning English as students will be allocated to different host families individually. That makes them to be more independent and well organize for the school life in Melbourne.

I was allocated to Blackburn which is a suburb in Victoria. I was lucky to spend my summer holiday with them as I learnt so much from this family. Since we were told that we had water restriction in Melbourne, that meant we had to finish our showers in around 5 minutes. Fortunately, my host family did not have those rules and they allowed me to have free internet since we were also told that some host families might charge them around 30 AUD for internet fee.

They made me a lovely breakfast and gave me a little historical lecture about Melbourne during the first afternoon.  I was excited to get along with some students from Shanghai as we were from different regions but coming for the same programme. In the second week, we met some Japanese students and learnt some cultural differences. Even if we had only two weeks studying with them, we built a good friendship and had a wonderful night at a party.

One of the greatest moments of my study life in Melbourne was skydiving. I did not make a plan of doing that before I set off from Macao. Even if the price went up 30% more, I still went for it on my second weekend. I learnt a quote from an Australian teacher and it could be strongly applied to the skydiving story. ‘ You think this is bad, it is just the tip of the iceberg’ which means that something worse may happen to you. We made an appointment for skydiving at 10:30am and my friend came in at 10:15. We needed to pay 10 AUD extra to the taxi driver as she had been waiting for us for half an hour. There were three people going for the adventure including me. When we went up to 14,000 feet, I felt like I was in another world as there were lots of clouds around us and we saw nothing literally. When the staff opened the cabin for us, it was quite scary for me to sit on the edge of the plane. The greatest moment of the whole adventure was falling down without parachute and centrifugal force.

Since it was an academic programme, we went to CPA for a business short trip. It is one the world’s largest accounting bodies with a membership of more than 150,000 finance, accounting and business professionals in 121 countries across the globe. We had such a lovely time in there for 3 hours with 6 speakers for their own presentations. It allowed us to be more professional by asking questions to those successful businessmen and experts in IT. Through their informative speech and factual life story, we could understand the way to success and how to be a motivated entrepreneur in the future.

I was lucky to have a chance of joining the GPP at IPM and it made my summer holiday more productive. I have gained much more knowledge from my host family in Melbourne and made many friends. I am also looking forward to have another opportunity to extend my horizon.