Indonesian postgraduate students may apply for scholarships for studies at Swiss universities. The grant of such scholarship is limited in number and students interested in taking advantage of it should hurry to submit their papers. The grants have strict rules; careful study of available information is therefore advised.

If you consider entering your submission, the principal information may be found here together with useful links. You should be aware that there are no exceptions made to the rules. If you are not a postgraduate student, don’t even bother to apply. It is also stipulated that the study chosen must be in the interest of Indonesian development, and certain types of studies are completely excluded, e.g. hotel management or fine arts.

To tick off the main points on the fast: You must be an Indonesian citizen, under 35, hold an university degree, and speak one of the national languages German, French, or Italian. The choice of your university in Switzerland is dependent on the national language you are proficient in. Within the language groups, different universities have different specialities; studying the individual information on each university homepage is therefore a necessary task to do first, as you must be accepted by the university of your choice before applying for the grant.

If your proficient language is Italian, you should study at the ‘Università della Svizzera Italiana’. If you know German, you have the choice of universities at Basel, Bern, Luzern, St. Gall, Zurich, and the Federal Technical University in Zurich. And for the French speaking, the universities of Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel, and the Federal Technical University in Lausanne are part of the choice open to students. There are specialized courses in English only, if you don’t know any of the languages, but you will be required to take part in a language course in preparation. This course is also covered by the grant.

Some universities have specialities that even I know of, e.g. St. Gall is leading for studies in economics, Fribourg is leading in Catholic Theology, and Basel is leading in Orthopaedic Medicine; Basel is also a Papal university where the studies in Catholic Church Law is possible. The Federal Technical University in Zurich in turn is involved in many avant-garde technical projects such as Solar Impulse or the Monte Rosa Hut.

If you want to know a bit about the university cities, I have submitted several articles in Triond’s Trifter on Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, St. Gall, and Zurich. For information on Fribourg, Lugano, Luzern, and Neuchatel I’ll have to do some work first, but I promise to post on them soon. Rest assured that they are just as lovely and exotic places as any of the others.