Stellenbosch University - SU
speciality: Linguistics

Having spent some of my primary and high school years living in Stellenbosch, I had already had sentimental ties to the town that were only made better during my time studying here. Stellenbosch as a town is highly student-centric and has a rich and diverse student body that enabled me to immerse myself fully in my academic journey.

However, based on my own experience and what I’ve heard from friends, both your academic and social fulfilment here is highly dependent on the faculty and even individual departments in which you’re based. Having been a student in the Arts and Social Sciences faculty, my experience was largely enjoyable because I was a little older when starting my first year and so had thoroughly researched what subjects I wanted to study, and the student body and faculty are generally more diverse in this faculty, meaning that there was less of a “bubble” or clique effect that I sometimes heard friends complain about. Even then, the way some departments operated changed my mind about what direction I ultimately wanted to go in as I progressed. For example, I had initially planned to take English literature until at least my second year but I found that the course seemed somewhat disorganised and the classes were more loosely structured than some of my other subjects. This made the modules seem chaotic at times, although this might have been due to too many students being registered for the first year course – based on my understanding, this is (or used to be) a frequent issue in this faculty.