Moving to a new country is easier when you can speak the language before you land. That is the thinking behind UMB's pre-arrival Bahasa Indonesia program, and it is one of the things that sets the UMB scholarship experience apart from simply receiving a tuition waiver and figuring out the rest on your own.
All scholarship recipients who have received their Letter of Acceptance (LoA) and confirmed their acceptance of the scholarship to UGE are enrolled in the BIPA program. Enrollment happens before departure, and the program begins online. Classes are delivered via Zoom or Google Meet, giving students a structured introduction to Bahasa Indonesia from wherever they are in the world. The sessions cover practical, everyday language that students will actually use when they arrive, not just grammar rules and vocabulary lists. By the time scholarship recipients board their flight to Indonesia, they already have a working foundation in the language and some familiarity with how daily life and communication in Indonesia actually sounds.
The BIPA program is managed by UMB's Language Center (Pusat Bahasa), which has the expertise and the academic framework to deliver language instruction at the right level for students who are starting from scratch. The hybrid delivery model means the learning does not stop at the airport. After arriving in Bengkulu, students continue their BIPA training on campus, building on what they covered in the pre-departure sessions and applying what they are learning in real daily interactions with the campus community around them. The progression from online pre-departure classes to in-person instruction on campus is designed to be seamless, so students are not starting over when they arrive but picking up where they left off.