It seems to be the common practice for universities around the world to adopt three-letter abbreviations. So you find UBD and ITB in Brunei, NTU and NUS in Singapore, MIT in the USA, and HKU in Hong Kong.
While these might work well locally, this does not seem to be such a good idea globally, as there are too many institutes using the same three letters. For example, in Singapore NTU stands for Nanyang Technological University, but in Taiwan the same three letters refer to National Taiwan University.
I was reminded of this when I was asked to supervise a student doing his third year internship at ITB. Great, I thought, I'll just pop down the road to the Institute of Technology Brunei, about five minutes away from my office, to see how he's getting on. Unfortunately, he is in Indonesia, at the Institute of Technology in Bandung. I guess I won't be able to visit him after all!
