Ikbala, Bosnia and Herzegovina

UNIVERSITY OF PRIMORSKA Student life in Slovenia gave me everything I expected when I watched American movies about college life after high school. I am a student at the Faculty of Tourism Studies Turistica of the University of Primorska, which is one of the eight members of the University of Primorska, located on the Slovenian coast. Studying on the Slovenian Adriatic Sea coast has allowed me to make my student life look like an extended vacation where I can study and work by myself. I had a wonderful team of people around me who motivated me to go one step further every day, with every lecture. My team consisted of professors, but also of other faculty members who always tried to make me feel not like a foreigner, but part of the big Turistica family. However, I was a foreigner, and the beginning of life in another country, with a different culture and language was not easy, but SLOVEnia is easy to love, has beautiful destinations where you feel you belong already after the first visit. The language was not such a big problem because I am from Bosnia and Herzegovina and my language has similarities with Slovenian, so when I came here I could understand a little bit. In the second semester I already started to speak Slovenian. The nature of tourism studies is such that we have a lot of field and practical work, so we quickly started to visit companies in our area, which gave me the opportunity to get my first job through the student service at hotels in Portorož, so at the age of 18 I became almost completely independent from my parents. Life on the coast has brought a complete change in my lifestyle. There is the Adriatic Sea and I went swimming every day. All the people around me go walking, cycling or roller-skating, so one day you start doing that too. The geographical location of the University also allowed me to travel easily: less than 15 minutes from Italy, half an hour from Croatia and an hour from Ljubljana, and very close to the rest of Western Europe. Excursions organized by student organizations enabled me to travel cheaply. Another of Slovenia’s biggest advantages as a study country are the student coupons, subsidized meals in restaurants where you can eat the whole meal for two euros, which is a great advantage when you leave your mother’s kitchen. Slovenia has given me many more things that would encourage me to return to this country.

Share: