Student Life

Mr. Tommaso Pavanin from Italy

I have started my exchange semester on March 21st and finished it on September 8th. During this semester, I had the chance to meet many interesting people and discover much about Japanese economy and, Kyushu economy. Being an exchange student from Italy, studying economics at the university of Nagasaki, and the internship at the 18bank gave me the opportunity to become more familiar with the Japanese working environment and to understand how important is the relationship between universities and companies.

More on details of what I have done during this semester will be needed to understand better my experience. At the beginning of the semester I met many interesting and funny people. Those people were both foreigners and Japanese. After a while we were hanging out together quite often and this helped a lot to make even more friends (especially among Japanese student). As today I am still in contact with many of the people met in Nagasaki and I hope that I will meet them again. Nagasaki city is a very nice place to live, not too big not too small, there are many beautiful places to spend time at and it is somehow active also during the night. One of the few negative side of the city, and japan in general, is the very high humidity and the extremely hot temperature in summer.

Overall, I would say that my exchange experience helped me to have a better understanding of Japanese working culture. Personally, the thing I found more interesting were some courses about the Japanese economy because I learned many useful information about Japanese trade and I also had an interesting discussion with the head of the office. Also, very important was the visit at the Castella factory where I visited the production site as well as the office JETRO during my internship. There I discussed with a consultant about the current sales strategies of the company and how they think to expand in the future. I was very surprised to find out that the trade ties with Europe (mainly the UK) are relatively few and they are much higher in the Asian countries and that they made an exposition of the Castella cake two years ago, in Milan. Overall, I think it was a positive experience and I am glad I have done it even if for a short period of only six months.

20/09/2017

Day trip to Takashima Island

Internship at Eighteenth Bank Ltd.