Details

• Chile
• MASozÖk-10
• Graduate
• WS 2025
• Time spent at the partner university: 3 months

1. Preparation

Visa: It is common for exchange students to get a normal tourist visa upon entering the country, instead of a “student visa”. This is the case because the student visa needs to be organized back at home through a quite extensive bureaucratic process and costs about 100€ while the normal tourist visa does not cost anything and will be given to you directly at the airport (migration control) without you needing to prepare anything in advance. The tourist visa is valid for 90 consecutive days after which you need to leave the country again. After you re-enter the country, you receive the exact same tourist visa again with another 90 consecutive days of legal stay. Therefore, it is common practice to make a weekend trip out of crossing the border to Argentina (most commonly Mendoza by bus) to renew one’s visa. Given that Chile is geographically very narrow and also has a lot of cheap international flight options, it is extremely easy to leave and re-enter the country for one’s visa. This is considerably less effort and all of my colleagues did it this way. PDI: At migration control they will give you a white paper that looks like a receipt. It is extremely important that you keep this paper for the entirety of your stay in Chile because you will need to show it to them again when you leave the country. This paper is called the PDI and serves as verification for the number of days you have already been in the country to track the validity of your 90-day visa. It is an official document which you must not throw away or lose. Also, if you travel inside the country take it with you because they will oftentimes ask for it at the check-in at hotels and hostels. Vaccinations: I got a lot of really expensive vaccinations before going to Chile (and Peru because I connected it), which turned out to not be necessary. I recommend reading into the likelihood of a certain disease happening to you in a specific area before blindly vaccinating everything that is recommended for the entire country. Of course, it is useful to have it but depending on your plans, it might be an unnecessary cost. (I’m especially talking about rabies which costs more than 350€ in total, because the likelihood of being bitten by something rabies-infected is extremely low and if it does happen to you then you need to get another vaccination within 24h anyways irrespective of any prior rabies vaccinations you may have). Spanish: If you need to refresh your Spanish for this trip focus especially on your listening skills. If you listen to podcasts/videos consider looking for ones which are in CHILEAN Spanish specifically, because it sounds quite different from the Spanish from Spain.

2. Accommodation

I lived in a shared student house which comes close to a shared apartment/student housing you would know from Austria. There are no huge student dorms like we have in Vienna, but if you look for a “casa” for students you may find something that comes close. I rented a room from Casa Milen, who have several houses in Santiago and was quite satisfied with the facility for the price I paid (very cheap and okay-ish rooms). It is actually not hard to find an apartment in Santiago because there is so much more supply than demand. So, if you want to have a look at your accommodation before signing any contracts, you can just rent an Airbnb for the first week and go apartment hunting then. My friends who did it this way were all able to move into a new flat within a few days. The location of your flat is relevant because it is not safe in all parts of the city. As a general rule of thumb try to stay on the right side (east) of the green subway-line. If you find something extremely close to the green line you can also consider it, but do that at your own discretion. If you want to be extremely safe, stay further to the east of the city (basically anywhere near the PUC university building/Manquehue), if you are looking for a more affordable option, I suggest staying in Barrio Italia or maybe somewhere around Baquedano/Salvador. I stayed in Baquedano and it is important that your apartment is not in the street Pío Nono but at least one - or better - more parallel streets away. In this street there are a lot of bars/discos so it gets unsafe after 22:00 but it is totally fine during the day. Like anywhere else in the city, just use your common sense and be aware of your surroundings and nothing will happen to you there before nighttime. The buses are rather unreliable, both in their schedule and whether they will actually care to stop for you, so it is best to live within walking distance of a subway station. Between about 7:00-9:30 the red subway line going towards university is extremely packed. Even though you will probably not have too many lectures starting that early, you may want to consider this fact.

3. Academic life at host university

Campus infrastructure: The building where you will have your lectures is near Manquehue subway station in the middle of the office district of Santiago. It looks nice but there are no other faculties/departments anywhere near, so it doesn’t feel too much like a campus. There are a lot of coffee shops, restaurants and minimarkets around, and it’s a very safe area. Language: Even though you don’t need to hand in a language certificate, you will have to understand what the lecturers are saying. If your Spanish is not sufficient, don’t take courses in Spanish, they will not have time to translate anything for your and you will oftentimes have to do groupwork with people who can only/mainly speak Spanish. Academic culture, teaching style, courses in comparison to those at WU Vienna: I think the overall quality of the courses was good, however this is a MBA, so the content of the lectures is not very critical. The teaching style varied a lot depending on the lecturers, ranging from extremely interactive to very presentational. You will have to do group work in most courses, but that is similar to WU.

5. Every day life in the host country

Public transport: The Subway system is very advanced and you feel very safe in general. However, on certain lines (especially the yellow line) you need to be aware of potential pickpockets. You will need to buy a bip card, which you can only do in person at any subway station, and you have to pay in cash. You can load your bip card with the desired amount of money (no higher than 25€) and each ride will deduce a specific amount of money. There are buses, but they sometimes don’t stop for people. Safety situation: I personally did not have any situations where I felt unsafe, so take the assessments of Chileans with a grain of salt when they warn you how dangerous the city has become. Chileans tend to have a much worse subjective feeling of safety than is statistically accounted for. However, during the nighttime certain areas of Santiago are truly dangerous and you should avoid them or at least take an Uber so that you have a minimum walking distance. Also, if you go out, wait for the Uber to drive directly in front of the location and only leave when you see that you can directly enter into the car without having to spend time on the street. I knew one guy who got robbed three times during his stay, but it was always because he wandered around alone and drunk in the streets of the party district… Social/leisure activities/events: You should enter the WhatsApp group Santiago Exchange, because they organize a lot of trips for international exchange students and opportunities to get to know new people. Also there is a weekly exchange student party called MiércolesPo, which is relatively nice. Most museums are free of charge. I have been told that the current president elect Kast, who is an extreme-right wing politician, has plans to close the Museum of human rights (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos) which details the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship and putsch, so if you make it to Santiago on time, I would definitely advise you to take a look as long as it is still there. Sports options: I never personally used the App, but most of my friends used ClassPass which allows you to book many different sport classes at a comparatively very cheap price.

6. Testimonial

My exchange to Santiago de Chile allowed me to prove to myself that I am capable of getting around in a completely new environment and thrive on experiencing new landscapes, food, and unfamiliar customs. I got to know very kind and open-minded exchange students from all over the world, who would include you in everything and extend their friendship to whoever you brought along. Even though they skeptically remark in the application process that most people at the PUC are older (35+), I still made a very good friend and several very nice acquaintances. I loved to be able to use my freedom to travel a lot during my exchange semester, allowing me to see more of Latin America than just the capital of Chile. I am glad I dared to go so far away and think you should too, because it allows you to see how great life is on the other side of the world, which some people denounce as too dangerous or poor to even look into. I was surprised by how modern, vibrant and expensive Chile was and every single person that visited me absolutely loved it there, so I think you will too.