Today was my second day at my new job here in Vietnam.  I’m now working as a teacher at RMIT University here in HCMC.  RMIT is an Australian-owned university whose parent university is in Melbourne, Australia.  It is the only 100% foreign-owned university in Vietnam, and is the largest employer of foreign citizens in Vietnam.

So far I have been extremely impressed.  A photo of the main building on campus is above.  The campus is top-notch all the way around, and really it’s only just begun.  There is campus-wide wi-fi, a nice library, abundant computer labs with brand new computers – PC and Mac, etc.  There are several restaurants on campus, a staff-only restaurant and coffee shop, and it has its own Highland Coffee (which is basically Vietnam’s version of Starbucks).

And they are in the process of adding a fifth floor to the main building, building a second, identical building adjacent to the main building, and building a stadium, swimming pool, tennis courts, student recreation center, and residence hall – so it’s going to be even nicer as those facilities come online over the next couple of years.

The best thing about the campus for me personally is that it’s literally about a 3-minute motorbike ride from my new house!

This semester I’m going to be teaching two courses – Commercial Law and Business Case Studies.  I’ll be teaching one Commercial Law class – which consists of two 1.5-hour sessions, and two Business Case Studies classes – each of which consists of two 1.5-hour sessions.  So a total of 9 hours per week of teaching.  We do have to be on campus or working at home – like grading papers, etc. – for 40 hours per week. 

There are about 4,000 students in Vietnam – most here at the HCMC campus and some at the Hanoi campus.  One neat thing is that any teacher in HCMC can go do a visiting semester in Hanoi any time they want to – so if I ever want to go experience living in Hanoi vs. HCMC without having to commit to a permanent move, I can do that easily now.

There are about 220 teachers in HCMC, and 12 new teachers are starting this semester, myself included.  10 have showed up so far, with two more to come later this week.  The 10 that are here are a really neat group:  me from the U.S., a girl from France, a girl from Slovenia, two other guys from the U.S., a girl from Malaysia, a guy from Australia, a guy born in Hong Kong but most recently from Australia, a girl from India, and a guy from Vietnam who grew up in the U.S.  Everyone has interesting backgrounds and I thnk it will be a good group to work with.

The students come on Monday the 25th.  This week we’re just doing orientation and training for the new teachers.

I am very excited about it and looking forward to teaching at RMIT for a long time!