Thursday, May 22, 2008

Week One Questions (Orientation Week and Pre-Flight Thoughts):

1) What are you looking forward to the most?
The whole experience, in general. I'm very excited to travel to a new place (I've never been anywhere in Asia before), learn about some of the culture and language and meet new people. I'm looking forward to seeing things that I've heard about but never actually seen before (the city of Beijing, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, etc.). Trying new food and being able to buy things for a very inexpensive price are also pluses.
Additionally, I'm very much looking forward to working in a physcial chemistry lab. I have no experience outside the field of organic chemistry and am interested to see how research methodology at PKU compares with what I've seen at Cornell.

2) What gives you any sense of anxiety at all about going?
There are a couple of aspects about the program that give me some anxiety (however, they also add to the excitement). The length of the program (10 weeks) is slightly intimidating. The prospect of being away from everything even remotely familiar to me for that length of time makes me a bit nervous. The other aspect that creates some anxiety is the language barrier. I've traveled overseas before, but never to any place where I haven't had a substantial introduction to the language spoken there. I know absolutely no Chinese and have no idea how to read Chinese characters. This will definitely make communication and getting around more challenging.

3) Not everyone who expressed interest ended up applying to go... what was the most compelling aspect of the program that made you DECIDE you wanted to do it?
Again, there wasn't just one aspect. It was just the overall feeling that the exciting and beneficial aspects of the program outweighed its intimidating ones.

4) The pre-program period in Ann Arbor is meant to get the group to get to know each other before the trip. Is this a good idea? Were the activities effective?
I thought the pre-program in Ann Arbor was a very good idea. It ended up being one day longer than it was supposed to be because of the some trouble with booking airplane tickets, but I think everything would have been fine if we had stuck to the original plan and the program had been a day shorter.
In any case, getting to know each other before traveling abroad was a good idea. I feel as if we have definitely succeeded in doing this over the past couple of days; which will make the future adjustments to come once we get to China easier to deal with.
Some of the pre-program activites were more beneficial than others. The intergroup relations activities were definitely good to do, I just thought they could have been shorter. It seemed as if the facilitators kept trying to push us to say more after we'd all already gotten the take-home message. Overall, though, they did bring up important issues that were good to think about before leaving on our trip. The group meals brought us closer together as well just by providing an oppurtunity for everyone to sit down together and chat. The "culture lesson" was another useful introduction to certain aspects of Chinese student life. Although, I think "culture lesson" was a slightly inappropriate title. It was more of a discussion of sorts. My favorite part of the pre-program was the first Chinese language lesson and going out to the Chinese resturant. Learning and practicing some Chinese was so much fun and it helped ease some of the anxiety I had about not knowing any Chinese. Eating "family-style" at the resturant was a great bonding experience as well and the food was terrific.

So that's pretty much orientation week and pre-China thoughts/feelings in a nutshell. We leave tomorrow so we'll be seeing how my expectations and fears compare to reality very soon!

1 comment:

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