My CET final oral exam on freedom of the internet
I made it a known fact in my post “China Decided To Give Me A Little Graduation Gift ” that I was almost positive I owned my final oral exam – a 10 minute oral presentation of an 800 character essay we had to write earlier the previous week. I assume most people haven’t seen an essay written in Chinese, either in characters or pinyin, and I thought it would be cool to post that essay on the blog – in characters, pinyin, and of course English. After considering the dangers of publishing a post on internet freedom in the middle of China, I decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So here it is, how Al Gore and Communism helped me ace my study abroad final.
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Everything study abroad for the week of January 8, 2012
I recently realized that it’s not easy to give out specific study abroad advice in my usual posts, so I’ve decided that I’m going to attempt to write a sort of weekly/biweekly “study abroad summary” if you will, called “Study Abroad Sense”. It could take the form of “what happened this week in Study Abroad”, it will almost definitely include helpful links and articles, and who knows what else. My goal here is to provide useful study abroad specific help, which means if it happened in the “world of study abroad”, but will in no way shape or form directly affect you, I won’t make you read about it.
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My 2012 study abroad New Year’s resolutions
No one ever told me about the rager going down at the Temple of Heaven so credit to the AP for the photo
I have mixed feelings about New Year’s resolutions. For the most part, I feel like if you want to accomplish something, there’s no need to wait until a specific day to start doing it. That being said, New Years is still a great reminder of how quick time flies. If nothing else, it allows me to reflect on everything I said I wanted to do over the course of the previous year (and whether or not I actually did them), as well as push me to start planning what I want to do next. In the spirit of that mindset, here’s 5 things I accomplished this past year, and 5 things I’m looking forward to/ want to/ need to do in 2012.
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A very Merry Tibetan Christmas from my friends and family to yours
This is the first time in my life I haven’t been in the United States for Christmas and New Years. While I obviously miss all my friends and family back home, I don’t regret my decision to stay in Beijing at all. I’m slowly getting adjusted to “real world” life here, but I’m still searching for my own place to live and flying back and forth between opposite ends of the globe in the span of a week just wouldn’t have been the most logical choice. And while it’s definitely not America, Beijing has it own unique spin on Christmas to offer us foreigners and I genuinely had a lot of fun over the holiday weekend.
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I can catch up on 3 months of lost sleep
My graduation Certificate
CET is officially over (and actually has been since last Friday). The Spring semester at Beijing University doesn’t start until February 10th, which means I have almost 2 months before I have to step inside a classroom again. I genuinely miss studying a chapters’ worth of grammar and 50 new vocab words everyday, but catching up on 3 months of lost sleep has been a great consolation. As great as it is, though, I’m not exactly on vacation seeing as I’ve still yet to find my own apartment or a paying job. Good times.
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I made it a known fact in my post “China Decided To Give Me A Little Graduation Gift ” that I was almost positive I owned my final oral exam – a 10 minute oral presentation of an 800 character essay we had to write earlier the previous week. I assume most people haven’t seen an essay written in Chinese, either in characters or pinyin, and I thought it would be cool to post that essay on the blog – in characters, pinyin, and of course English. After considering the dangers of publishing a post on internet freedom in the middle of China, I decided it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So here it is, how Al Gore and Communism helped me ace my study abroad final.
I'm a 23 year old college grad, and during my junior year abroad in Scotland, I came to the realization that it's hard to know what you want to do in this world if you've never seen it. With that in mind, I decided to study abroad again during the 2011-12 academic year, this time in Beijing, China. Read more