I don’t think I’ve been this busy since I pulled fifteen-hour days in high school. Last year at UCSD I had so much free time. I was able see all the latest episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, 30 Rock, Worst Week, and the Big Bang Theory. In addition, I watched all eight seasons of Scrubs and started from the beginning of How I Met Your Mother. This fall semester, I can’t remember when the last time I watched a television show was.
Here I’m busy, and for the first time in a long time, it’s not all about studying, I suppose. Back in high school, I did plenty of extracurricular activities, most of which not academic, most of which in the hopes of getting into a top-tier university. Now having been going to UCSD, I’ve realized that the way my life has been set out for me and the way that my cards have been dealt has been for the better.
To start, I believed and still do that the biggest part of getting a college education is the studying and the classes. After all, that’s what tuition pays for. Employers care more about your degree more than how much fun you have in the process. That’s not to say they don’t care about other things like work experience (and study abroad).
Needless to say, I am studying abroad at the moment and loving it. I still think that I’m here first and foremost to study, since, after all, if I wanted to go traveling I would take a leave of absence from school and go abroad without studying. And in this sense, there’s something to be said about travelling with obligations.
Something that few seem to talk about regarding studying abroad is the fact that while most students go traveling, they also have to make sure they’ve got their affairs in order so that they can go traveling. I myself have my work lined up for me. I know when I have to do it by so that it’ll get submitted appropriately and I realize that even though I don’t want to work, sometimes I have to.
My parents would be proud if I ever asked them their opinion.
By late September, I had only been out of Hong Kong once—to Macau for an overnight trip. My mother wanted to make sure I went traveling to as many East Asian places as possible, since, as she put it, it would be cheaper to do it from here in Hong Kong than back home in California.
So what was I doing the first month here? Unlike now, I had little work to actually do. I used both hands to count how many weeks until the end of the semester. I went around Hong Kong. Granted, I haven’t really explored New Territories much, but as for the Harbour vicinity, I know it like the back of my hand. I’ve seen most everything on the Island side and I could rattle off bus numbers to take to get to where you need to go and back.
So starting in Reading Week, I went to Beijing. I could tell that my mother wasn’t exactly thrilled that I was going back to a place I’d already been to, but I think it turned out to be a really good experience. The other weekend I went off to Taipei and as with any other city, there were things that I expected and more that I didn’t. Last weekend I went back to Shenzhen and got my hair cut (with a “Thai” massage for a very good price). This weekend I’m planning on going to Guilin and have bought sleeper train tickets already. After that I’m planning on going to Thailand; and though unscheduled, I’d like to go to Singapore and Japan before I leave.
Also in the last two weeks, I had two midterm examinations, submitted two papers, and made three presentations. Before Reading Week, I went had one as well. Still to go I have two papers (one research and one op-ed) and another presentation, not to mention six finals to deal with. And before the worrying begins, all the grades that I’ve gotten back thus far have been As (or at least A minuses). Oh and of course I’ve got this blog, which I’ve really dedicated myself to if I do say so myself, which I’ve added nearly 20,000 words to in the last two weeks in fifteen posts. (Check my total word count below.)
It’s a lot, but I’m dealing with it fine through good coordination and a decent planning. In some ways, how my travel plans in conjunction with studying necessities turned out was bad. When I barely had any work, I did local sightseeing—easy and convenient. As the semester has been progressing, my workload has been increasing, as been my traveling, and consequently my blog writing.
All I can say is it’s all part of the experience I guess.
On the other hand, a friend of mine’s roommate managed to do practically the reverse of what I did. Starting early, she went everywhere every weekend. Before class started, she started with Cambodia, Thailand, and if I remember correctly Vietnam. The first few weekends she was gone to places like Borneo, Malaysia, and Singapore. Now though, she’s staying in Hong Kong and doesn’t believe she’ll be going anywhere else (until at least after finals) now that her workload has picked up noticeably.
In some ways, her scheduling was better. She and I both managed to see much of the same stuff. She managed to fit it with her workload much better than I did. On the other hand (not that I think even half of the time that my life works out better), when I arrived in Hong Kong, I had more immediate priorities. I was in a foreign environment and I really had a need to get used to my new surroundings before I could go venturing off to other countries. In some ways, my friends and I know more about Hong Kong than my friend’s roommate does. We probably have seen more of Hong Kong as well.
So whose plan turned out to be better? I don’t know; my internal jury is still out, and I don’t think it’ll ever be back in. I guess it really doesn’t matter.
All I know is that I’m swamped. After school every day, I find myself in the medical library (it’s less crowded and closer to Lee Hysan Hall) studying and planning, writing and reading. Right now, I’m going to get back to studying.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Showing posts with label fall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fall. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The Point of No Return
Two months in I stand; two months in I see. Like a ship halfway to its destination, I know I have so much behind me now and yet there’s so much in front of me as well. In a way it’s misleading. I don’t really want to go back at the moment. I look forward to my return, just not this December, not in two months. However, in no way am I home scot-free. My experience here still has the very real possibility of being a naufraga in the same way that I don’t know if I’ll still be alive tomorrow. It requires constant maintenance, and more often than not, it’s an uphill battle.
I arrived August 21, confused, dazed, and fresh off a thirteen-hour flight without sleep. My passport was then used just a few times. Upon entering the country, I was given a student entry stamp on the page opposite my student visa. The square, black stamp looked to take up most of the page to my surprise. The airport gave false impressions of Hong Kong—not false as in better or worse, but false as in different. Getting off the train on Hong Kong Island, I was greeted with lots of noise, winding roads, and my first experience seeing traffic move on the left.
With time, I adjusted. The sweltering heat and humidity lessened slightly as my tolerance increased. The bus system that once confused me became manageable and I could successfully ask to get off the minibus in Cantonese—a skill than increased to requesting stops in specific locations. I found where the better food is and how to deal with copious amounts of rice.
I guess you could say that I’ve now plateaued culturally. While there still is room to grow, there will always be, and I will continue to progress, just slower. As I went from being nervous, I can now say I’m quite the opposite. Whereas at first I missed home and was counting down the days to go back, I find myself now trying to maximize the rest of my time here. I’ve lost count and already I want to do this again somewhere else next fall semester, money and time permitting, of course.
So where am I to go from here? I’ve not yet reached the top of the mountain, though I’ve been to the Peak twice. My finals schedule is starting to shape up, though I don’t care for it to end. With my eyes perpetually towards the future, I’ve decided to take the time to enjoy the present.
To this effect, I’ve begun a project that won’t be done until the end of the year. The idea hatched as I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art for my Introduction to the Arts of Asia class to research for a paper. The topic was hand scrolls, which have an aesthetic to them that requires observation beyond that of any western painting I’ve seen.
To read a hand scroll properly, you roll it open section by section, right to left. At several meters long, each tends to tell a story, accompanied often by deeper meaning. Many are accompanied with poetry, but the use of motifs and themes allow the artist to tell the story in an abstract fashion. By story, I mean journey, and there is usually a path in the scroll guiding the reader’s eyes through this journey.
For this art paper, we were to observe Qiu Ying’s 清明商河图 or “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” as it is usually translated. We were to compare this Ming Dynasty scroll to Zhang Zeduan’s original of the same name, which was painted during the Song Dynasty. I won’t get into the specifics, though it is clear that Qiu Ying’s is not merely a copy of Zhang Zeduan’s.
To aid my paper, I bought a scaled reprint of the hand scroll at the museum’s bookstore, realizing later that it was in postcard format—fifteen postcards to be exact. Later I realized that this painting, divided into sections by the creases into postcards, being a journey, could be parallel to my journey here.
So I decided to cut apart this scroll replica into the postcards that were on the reverse. Sending them all back to my home in California, I addressed them as such, and stamped them all. As a representation of my journey here in Hong Kong, I’m sending them off from fifteen different post boxes, noting the location and its significance, as well as the date and time at which I sent it.
When I get back home, hopefully all fifteen will have arrived. At that point, I’m going to reattach them back together. This scroll reprint, in postcard/booklet format will then show the journey to the city center of Kaifeng on the front and my journey to Hong Kong on the back.
There are now four weeks of instruction left, so with deadlines looming and a push for more travels to look forward to, I shall resume my studying.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
I arrived August 21, confused, dazed, and fresh off a thirteen-hour flight without sleep. My passport was then used just a few times. Upon entering the country, I was given a student entry stamp on the page opposite my student visa. The square, black stamp looked to take up most of the page to my surprise. The airport gave false impressions of Hong Kong—not false as in better or worse, but false as in different. Getting off the train on Hong Kong Island, I was greeted with lots of noise, winding roads, and my first experience seeing traffic move on the left.
With time, I adjusted. The sweltering heat and humidity lessened slightly as my tolerance increased. The bus system that once confused me became manageable and I could successfully ask to get off the minibus in Cantonese—a skill than increased to requesting stops in specific locations. I found where the better food is and how to deal with copious amounts of rice.
I guess you could say that I’ve now plateaued culturally. While there still is room to grow, there will always be, and I will continue to progress, just slower. As I went from being nervous, I can now say I’m quite the opposite. Whereas at first I missed home and was counting down the days to go back, I find myself now trying to maximize the rest of my time here. I’ve lost count and already I want to do this again somewhere else next fall semester, money and time permitting, of course.
So where am I to go from here? I’ve not yet reached the top of the mountain, though I’ve been to the Peak twice. My finals schedule is starting to shape up, though I don’t care for it to end. With my eyes perpetually towards the future, I’ve decided to take the time to enjoy the present.
To this effect, I’ve begun a project that won’t be done until the end of the year. The idea hatched as I went to the Hong Kong Museum of Art for my Introduction to the Arts of Asia class to research for a paper. The topic was hand scrolls, which have an aesthetic to them that requires observation beyond that of any western painting I’ve seen.
To read a hand scroll properly, you roll it open section by section, right to left. At several meters long, each tends to tell a story, accompanied often by deeper meaning. Many are accompanied with poetry, but the use of motifs and themes allow the artist to tell the story in an abstract fashion. By story, I mean journey, and there is usually a path in the scroll guiding the reader’s eyes through this journey.
For this art paper, we were to observe Qiu Ying’s 清明商河图 or “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” as it is usually translated. We were to compare this Ming Dynasty scroll to Zhang Zeduan’s original of the same name, which was painted during the Song Dynasty. I won’t get into the specifics, though it is clear that Qiu Ying’s is not merely a copy of Zhang Zeduan’s.
To aid my paper, I bought a scaled reprint of the hand scroll at the museum’s bookstore, realizing later that it was in postcard format—fifteen postcards to be exact. Later I realized that this painting, divided into sections by the creases into postcards, being a journey, could be parallel to my journey here.
So I decided to cut apart this scroll replica into the postcards that were on the reverse. Sending them all back to my home in California, I addressed them as such, and stamped them all. As a representation of my journey here in Hong Kong, I’m sending them off from fifteen different post boxes, noting the location and its significance, as well as the date and time at which I sent it.
When I get back home, hopefully all fifteen will have arrived. At that point, I’m going to reattach them back together. This scroll reprint, in postcard/booklet format will then show the journey to the city center of Kaifeng on the front and my journey to Hong Kong on the back.
There are now four weeks of instruction left, so with deadlines looming and a push for more travels to look forward to, I shall resume my studying.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Quality v. Quality
Somehow I wanted to insert this aspect of my college experience into this blog by making it relevant somehow. Here’s my shot. I have full confidence that I may express certain feelings without upsetting certain people, mostly because I am sure that most of those people are not reading my blog. Some will be glad to read this post and some might think I’m just being bitter. Please believe me when I say that I have no intention of either.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Gist of It: General Orientation
The UCSD Programs Abroad Office held their mandatory general study abroad orientation for summer and fall departures this last Wednesday, and to my surprise it was more about cultural adjustment and health issues than anything else. As expected, the country-specific orientation focuses on our specific programs and the logistics of the whole thing. Hong Kong’s is set for May 16. Two things from this first orientation in particular that really stuck out were the “cultural iceberg” and Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment, both illustrated in the packets distributed at the meeting. Though out of the discussion I don’t believe I learned anything particularly new, the fact that it brought much possible elation about the whole experience back down to earth was probably necessary.
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
The cultural iceberg is a succinct representation of how we think about other countries and other cultures. The idea is that just as you can only see the top tenth of an iceberg, with the lower nine-tenths indiscernible from above water (Titanic, anyone?), most people only see the superficial aspects of culture and do not realize the other nine-tenths of a culture until later (maybe not until it’s too late?). To anyone that knows about and or feels a sense of belonging to more than one culture, this idea, possibly in a different metaphor, likely exists at a profound level. So above water is what we all see—in a word, pop culture: river dancing for Ireland, videogames and high technology for Japan, Shakespeare for England, ABBA for Sweden (thanks, Dad!), etcetera. It’s what our main interests are in as foreigners, as observers. The lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is comprised of things like “notions of modesty,” “ideals governing child raising,” “conception of status mobility,” “roles in relation to status by age, sex, class, occupation, kinship, etc.,” and many, many more. This lower nine-tenths of the iceberg is where we find fundamental differences in with our own culture, where we can easily explain a difference in culture through morality and ethics though the reality is much more complicated than that.
Despite this, in the classes I’ve taken, and not from orientation, I have learned that a big problem with studying “them” or “other” cultures exists in the notion that we consider ourselves to be normal, or relatively normal to others. An example of this is the common utterance “I don’t have an accent,” which is so common among people with many different accents that anyone who’s thought about it has to wonder, so who doesn’t have an accent? The only logical conclusion is that everyone has an accent, because linguistically speaking, no language, dialect, or accent is more neutral than another by human physiology. Therein lies the problem. In putting distance between us and them, we fail to see the similarities between people, instead emphasizing the differences. As cliché as it sounds, we are all more alike than we are different. And in the end we all share 99.9% of the same DNA, with scientific research showing that there is more genetic variation within (the artificially constructed) races than between them.
Therefore, while it was important that this iceberg theory brought our expectations regarding our cultural change to light, it is equally important that we not make a big fuss about all of this and simply open up to the host culture with an open and clear mind.
The second thing that stuck out to me was Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment. Though the concept is legitimate and well accepted, the illustration is accurate but comical, making us students studying abroad look bipolar.
It looks like radio frequency, with it constant ups and downs. As an emotional representation, the lows are emotional lows and the highs are emotional highs, representing different milestones in our study abroad (and subsequent reintegration into American society.
The points are as follows:
1. initial anxiety
2. initial elation
3. initial culture shock
4. superficial adjustment to host culture
5. depression-frustration with host culture
6. acceptance of host culture
7. return anxiety
8. return elation
9. re-entry
10. reintegration
So right now, I’m probably at number 1. Assuming this model is true, 1 is actually the only feasible stage I can be at, because I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll undoubtedly be in that stage through my 14-hour plane ride, and even in exiting their relatively really new airport.
Some colleges offering reorientation programs to students returning from study abroad
By Jean Cowden Moore, Ventura County Star, Monday, March 9, 2009
My father sent me a link to this article shortly after I found out that I had gotten into the University of Hong Kong program. It outlines stages 7-10 of the model and shows how some universities, such as California Lutheran University in my hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, offer and sometimes require reorientation programs to ease the transition back into American life. Outlined in the article are some details of why many students have trouble upon return, include seeing life in the United States as being wasteful and or fondness for their host culture abroad. In addition, any excitement held by the returnee, as pointed out in orientation, can be exploded onto one’s family and friends, causing them to lose interest in the experience, bottling up any nostalgic feelings with others’ annoyance at perseverance of the topic.
UCSD neither requires nor offers a reorientation program, but instead encourages students coming back to attend returnee group meetings, where students get to share their experiences with one another. Besides, everyone I’ve met has told me that studying abroad is supposed to be a positive experience, so these “support groups” after the fact wouldn’t be bad to take advantage of.
Just some thoughts…and thanks for reading.
*
Sunday, April 26, 2009
First Post, Background
So this is my first post to this blog. I've never blogged before, so my style may seem odd to those of you seasoned bloggers. Yes, I know, it's not August quite yet, but I figured I wanted to record all of my thoughts before, during, and possibly after my experience.
Though a minority of undergraduates study abroad, doing so seems to be something of a common college experience, soon to be my own. I am told that out of the University of California campuses, San Diego (UCSD) leads in students studying abroad in any manner, and out of the six colleges at UCSD, Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC) has by far the most students studying abroad. I happen to belong to both, so in short, I am in good company.
Currently, I am a first-year student, which will me a second-year when I study abroad next fall. It is my understanding that many students study abroad junior year, but I have decided to do it this fall because I plan to graduate early—three to five quarters to be exact, making me part of the Class of 2010 or the Class of 2011, though more likely the latter. This means that right now I have junior standing and will have senior standing after the end of this school year. Yeah, I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and plenty of community college classes in and during high school to get to where I am, and now there’s little doubt that it shows in my current standing.
Unlike many of my classmates, only a handful of whom I know fully intend on staying till graduation, I quite openly like UCSD, and I love ERC because of its international focus. ERC was my first college of choice when I applied to UCSD, and now I am honored to be studying here as part of its 20th entering class. Unlike many of my fellow students, I take great interest in the Making of the Modern World program (MMW), and am confident that the vast majority of ERC students do come out of the six-quarter sequence more knowledgeable about the world. When they graduate, I’m sure they will feel that the experience contributed to their education in a way that other general education requirements, even those at the other colleges at UCSD, do not. I originally entered college with the plan to complete a double major in Linguistics (Spec. in Language in Society) and International Studies-Political Science, but because of my interest in MMW (especially in quarters 2 and 3) I have recently found the desire to pick up a minor in the Study of Religion.
In studying abroad, I chose Hong Kong with my International Studies major in mind. The International Studies curriculum is interdisciplinary, with students having to choose a primary track (for me Political Science) and a secondary track (Anthropology). With my main focus being in Political Science, I was hoping to learn more about the "one country, two governments" system in place since the British handover in 1997. As I need an area of regional specialization for ERC as well as for my International Studies major, I have chosen (East) Asia to reflect this. For one of my classes, I wrote a four thousand, five hundred-word paper on the bilingual/trilingual language situation in public and private life in Hong Kong. In addition, Hong Kong forms a complicated and unique part of my heritage. While my father is a natural-born American from Detroit, Michigan, my mother is originally from Hong Kong, and immigrated to the United States when she was 11. The history of my mother's side of the family is directly influenced by Chinese politics and history, because her parents were both from well-off families in Hangzhou, near Shanghai. They fled south when the communists came to power, first going to nationalist-controlled Taiwan, then to what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. My father’s parents are from rural Guangdong Province (what was long called Canton) yet he himself has never set foot outside North America. This, in combination with the fact that my mother immigrated at such a young age means that my exposure to any variety of Chinese has been minimal at very best. I am truly a third-generation American.
So to make myself clear, I do not speak Chinese.
Well, I speak broken conversational Mandarin and, to a lesser extent, Cantonese, but the fact of the matter is that my household was English-only and I learned my first Mandarin word around the age of 4 and never realized that other languages don’t necessarily follow English grammar until I was probably around 10. Still I can barely read and less can I hold a mildly sophisticated conversation. My second and third languages are Spanish and French, which I speak with relative fluency. This fact, while astonishing to some, should constantly be considered in my posts here on out. I will need time to adjust to Chinese customs and more time to gain moderate fluency in Cantonese and or Mandarin. Because of this disconnect, I comfortably refer to myself as first and foremost American.
I chose the University of Hong Kong (HKU) because it has a rich history and prestigious rankings. It is above the University of California schools worldwide and is known as being one of the top five universities in Greater Asia. Founded by the British in 1911, it has a traditional coat of arms, and like most universities in Hong Kong, teaches nearly all its classes in English (I'm assuming for now the British Received Pronunciation standard). In this sense, I do not need to worry too much about language barriers, at least within the university. The two other universities that UC sends students to are the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (of which my uncle was founding president and at which my cousin currently teaches and researches). HKU is the hardest to get into of the three, both in general and on exchange, with just eight spots for the twenty-five-plus UCSD that applied for this coming fall. I am fortunate to be going there.
In the coming weeks before my departure, I plan to write more about my application process and the current thoughts going around my head because I have a lot to say. If you've read this far into my initial post, I congratulate you and thank you, and hope that you’ll keep reading. In attempting to find an appropriate end to this initial post, what comes to mind now is a phrase used for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing:
北京欢迎您。(Beijing welcomes you.)
Or in my case,
香港欢迎我，(Hong Kong welcomes me,)
hopefully.
*
Though a minority of undergraduates study abroad, doing so seems to be something of a common college experience, soon to be my own. I am told that out of the University of California campuses, San Diego (UCSD) leads in students studying abroad in any manner, and out of the six colleges at UCSD, Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC) has by far the most students studying abroad. I happen to belong to both, so in short, I am in good company.
Currently, I am a first-year student, which will me a second-year when I study abroad next fall. It is my understanding that many students study abroad junior year, but I have decided to do it this fall because I plan to graduate early—three to five quarters to be exact, making me part of the Class of 2010 or the Class of 2011, though more likely the latter. This means that right now I have junior standing and will have senior standing after the end of this school year. Yeah, I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and plenty of community college classes in and during high school to get to where I am, and now there’s little doubt that it shows in my current standing.
Unlike many of my classmates, only a handful of whom I know fully intend on staying till graduation, I quite openly like UCSD, and I love ERC because of its international focus. ERC was my first college of choice when I applied to UCSD, and now I am honored to be studying here as part of its 20th entering class. Unlike many of my fellow students, I take great interest in the Making of the Modern World program (MMW), and am confident that the vast majority of ERC students do come out of the six-quarter sequence more knowledgeable about the world. When they graduate, I’m sure they will feel that the experience contributed to their education in a way that other general education requirements, even those at the other colleges at UCSD, do not. I originally entered college with the plan to complete a double major in Linguistics (Spec. in Language in Society) and International Studies-Political Science, but because of my interest in MMW (especially in quarters 2 and 3) I have recently found the desire to pick up a minor in the Study of Religion.
In studying abroad, I chose Hong Kong with my International Studies major in mind. The International Studies curriculum is interdisciplinary, with students having to choose a primary track (for me Political Science) and a secondary track (Anthropology). With my main focus being in Political Science, I was hoping to learn more about the "one country, two governments" system in place since the British handover in 1997. As I need an area of regional specialization for ERC as well as for my International Studies major, I have chosen (East) Asia to reflect this. For one of my classes, I wrote a four thousand, five hundred-word paper on the bilingual/trilingual language situation in public and private life in Hong Kong. In addition, Hong Kong forms a complicated and unique part of my heritage. While my father is a natural-born American from Detroit, Michigan, my mother is originally from Hong Kong, and immigrated to the United States when she was 11. The history of my mother's side of the family is directly influenced by Chinese politics and history, because her parents were both from well-off families in Hangzhou, near Shanghai. They fled south when the communists came to power, first going to nationalist-controlled Taiwan, then to what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. My father’s parents are from rural Guangdong Province (what was long called Canton) yet he himself has never set foot outside North America. This, in combination with the fact that my mother immigrated at such a young age means that my exposure to any variety of Chinese has been minimal at very best. I am truly a third-generation American.
So to make myself clear, I do not speak Chinese.
Well, I speak broken conversational Mandarin and, to a lesser extent, Cantonese, but the fact of the matter is that my household was English-only and I learned my first Mandarin word around the age of 4 and never realized that other languages don’t necessarily follow English grammar until I was probably around 10. Still I can barely read and less can I hold a mildly sophisticated conversation. My second and third languages are Spanish and French, which I speak with relative fluency. This fact, while astonishing to some, should constantly be considered in my posts here on out. I will need time to adjust to Chinese customs and more time to gain moderate fluency in Cantonese and or Mandarin. Because of this disconnect, I comfortably refer to myself as first and foremost American.
I chose the University of Hong Kong (HKU) because it has a rich history and prestigious rankings. It is above the University of California schools worldwide and is known as being one of the top five universities in Greater Asia. Founded by the British in 1911, it has a traditional coat of arms, and like most universities in Hong Kong, teaches nearly all its classes in English (I'm assuming for now the British Received Pronunciation standard). In this sense, I do not need to worry too much about language barriers, at least within the university. The two other universities that UC sends students to are the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (of which my uncle was founding president and at which my cousin currently teaches and researches). HKU is the hardest to get into of the three, both in general and on exchange, with just eight spots for the twenty-five-plus UCSD that applied for this coming fall. I am fortunate to be going there.
In the coming weeks before my departure, I plan to write more about my application process and the current thoughts going around my head because I have a lot to say. If you've read this far into my initial post, I congratulate you and thank you, and hope that you’ll keep reading. In attempting to find an appropriate end to this initial post, what comes to mind now is a phrase used for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing:
北京欢迎您。(Beijing welcomes you.)
Or in my case,
香港欢迎我，(Hong Kong welcomes me,)
hopefully.
*
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