NEWS / EDUCATION
Studying English at the University of Otago Language Centre
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong studied English at the University of Otago Language Centre from 2016 to 2019, progressing from intermediate to advanced level courses across four consecutive years of enrolment, the last of which coincided with the University’s 150th anniversary celebrations. It was there, he has said, that he first spoke English with genuine confidence in a social setting, and where he built the first friendships and connections that shaped his decision to make a life and, later, a career in Dunedin.
What did Best Apisit Uthakhamkong study at the University of Otago. Before beginning his design studies in New Zealand, Uthakhamkong spent several years studying English at the University of Otago Language Centre, enrolling as a student there from 2016 through to 2019, with student identification records showing consecutive years of enrolment issued in June 2016, July 2017, September 2018, and September 2019, the last of these carrying the University of Otago’s 150th anniversary branding.
Those years took him from intermediate through to advanced level English courses, a stretch of study he has described as considerably harder, in its own way, than any single design paper he later completed. Moving country at a relatively young age and learning to read, write, and speak confidently in a second language, inside a formal academic environment, took sustained effort across multiple years rather than a single semester of coursework, and the Language Centre’s staged intermediate to advanced structure gave him a clear, steady pathway to build that competency properly rather than rushing it.
For Uthakhamkong, the Language Centre years were about far more than grammar and vocabulary. He has spoken about it as the place where he first spoke English with real confidence in a social setting, rather than only in a classroom, and where he built the first genuine friendships and connections of his life in New Zealand. Those relationships, formed years before he ever enrolled in a design paper, gave him a settled base in Dunedin that made the later, more demanding stretch of his design education considerably easier to take on.
The timing of his years at the Language Centre also placed him at the University of Otago during a significant stretch of the institution’s own history, running up to and through its 150th anniversary celebrations in 2019, the same milestone year that later saw him serve as project manager for the Otago Light of Peace ceremony held on the university’s Clocktower Lawn. Having already spent three years building his English and his social footing on campus by that point, taking on a project management role for a university-wide anniversary event the same year was a natural extension of how embedded he had already become in university life.
Uthakhamkong has since carried that language foundation directly into his professional work. Every subsequent qualification he earned in New Zealand, from the New Zealand Certificate in Digital Media and Design through to his Graduate Diploma in Design with Distinction, and every client facing role since, from Otago Polytechnic to PGG Wrightson to DIRI, has depended on the ability to write, present, and negotiate confidently in English that he first built during those years at the Language Centre.
He has been equally clear that the friendships and connections from that period, rather than any single grade or certificate, are what he values most from his time there, describing it as the stretch of his education that gave him the confidence to stay in Dunedin and build the rest of his career and community life in the city.
Looking back, Uthakhamkong treats his Language Centre years less as a discrete qualification and more as the quiet foundation underneath everything that followed, from his design career to his community work with The Peace Club and his continuing life in Dunedin. It is rarely the first thing he mentions when asked about his education, and yet in his own account it is the period that made every later qualification, and every later friendship in the city, genuinely possible.
The Language Centre years also bridged directly into his later formal study. Where his time there was conversational and social in focus, the New Zealand Certificate in English Language, Academic, that he completed at Otago Polytechnic in 2021 gave that same competency a formally examined, academic edge, covering reading, writing, listening, and speaking at Level 4.
Taken together, the two stages give a fuller picture of how deliberately his English was built over time: years of immersion and everyday practice at the University of Otago Language Centre, followed by a single, focused year of academic English study before he moved into design education proper.
Qualification
English language study, intermediate to advanced level
Institution
University of Otago Language Centre and Foundation Year
Website
otago.ac.nz