Australia: Newcastle
Educational Setting
The University of Newcastle is a large, public university on the South-East coast of Australia in the state of New South Wales. There are about 30,300 students enrolled in Newcastle’s over 150 undergraduate and graduate programs. Newcastle is divided into 5 campuses: the main campus (and largest) is Callaghan Campus, located in a suburb of Newcastle; Central Coast Campus is in Ourimbah about an hour South of Newcastle; Port Macquarie Campus about 3 hours North of Newcastle; and two special campuses – one in Singapore and the other in Sydney’s Central Business District.
Students must be fairly self-motivated. There are very few assignments for each class and lecture attendance is not mandatory. Final exams are often worth upwards of 60% of the final grade. Students must keep up on all the material or they will be overwhelmed at the end of the semester. Classes are longer than at Juniata (often a 2 hour lecture), but they are structured so that students probably will not have class all 5 days a week. One student was surprised how challenging the classes were. “I was expecting my study abroad classes to be a lot easier than JC, but they were pretty hard. I enjoyed learning in a new setting.”
-Megan Coutts, studied in Newcastle Fall 2010
