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I was SO honored to be asked to speak to a couple of classes at Georgetown. 💙 So surreal to be the guest lecturer in the same class I took 5 years ago. #hoyasaxa #georgetownforever (at Georgetown University)

#hoyasaxa #georgetownforever

the University experience

Although I am in my fourth year of university studies, being on a new campus in Hong Kong makes me feel just as lost as a first year student again. I am experiencing things here for a the first time, both good and bad.

The first thing that I feel like I’ve experienced here which I didn’t get a chance to in the states is that of attending a state school. The luxury of waking up 5 minutes before class, rolling out of bed, and hustling across campus still making it to class on time is no longer something I have here. Getting to a class across campus involves elaborate planning and timing, and sometimes a shuttle transfer is even the best option. Finding elevators and stairwells that will take me from northwest campus to central to southeast campus in less than half an hour is probably the most valuable knowledge I have here. The best thing about being on such a large campus is the variety of places I can choose to study, eat, or work out (if I ever get around to that). The university is divided into 9 sub-colleges, each with its own canteen, library, and dorms. United College, the one I am in, has its own gym and conveniently the campus bar (yes, there is a bar on campus in one of the lecture buildings with back-to-school promotions!). I am currently writing this blog post between class in the main campus library, which makes LAU look like even more of a dungeon than it already did to me before. I am making an effort to try eating at every canteen here and trying new foods before I leave. With all of the options, I doubt I would get to it all even in 4 months with 3 meals a day. Classes have started here in Hong Kong and with my schedule finalized, I am relieved to finally have a routine. The process of add-drop itself was an absolute nightmare. The online add-drop opened Monday evening at 8:30PM and with first-come-first-serve, the traffic to the site caused it to crash for many of us. But luckily, an hour later I was able to add into all the courses I needed. The classes are structured here in that there is one lecture for about 2.25 hours and one tutorial session for 45 minutes per week. The structure allows for much more flexibility in scheduling, but I am not sure yet how that will fare out in terms of studies. The class structure here allowed me to organize my schedule to have classes only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday even with 5 courses (15-credits), something really unheard of back home. The class sizes I have here range from 13-60 students, which is quite small for such a large school. In terms of the standard of education here, I have noticed a significant difference from studying at Georgetown. I don’t know if this is a result of my taking classes offered in English although most of the courses at CUHK are supposedly offered in English and students here are required to know English as a second language, but from what I noticed, the coursework here is much less demanding than any course I’ve taken at home. Despite CUHK being one of the top universities in Asia, ranked 39th in the world, 7th in Asia and 3rd in Hong Kong, I find I am not too impressed with the academic rigor of the coursework. In my 4000 level linguistics course, most of the students in the class have admitted to not having ever read original research or written a research paper. They are apparently not required to do any writing in their other courses, something that was very surprising to me as well as my professor who had previously taught in the U.S.. In my intermediate Mandarin class, we spend almost the entire three hours of lecture being lectured at… the students are not required to even read characters but are allowed to read pinyin (the romanized version of the characters). The one quiz I have taken so far was not only multiple choice, but the answer was read aloud by the professor, our only task was to select the answer she reads. When we read the text in class, we are often reading the pinyin. We are not required to write any characters, and practice quizzes are online true-false. We don’t practice conversation, or making grammar structures, the main goal of the course being comprehension and not production. Furthermore, the grading scale here (at least for my Chinese course) is also skewed in that an 80-90% qualifies as an A-. The only challenging thing I find about the course is that lecture is conducted 90% in Mandarin which thankfully, Georgetown has well prepared me for. All of the local students on campus seem to speak English very well which led me to believe CUHK had a serious language program, so the lack of rigor in the Yale-China Chinese Language program came as quite the disappointment. Local students’ grasp of English grammar and vocabulary is extremely solid, the only thing off would be pronunciation but even that has not caused me any trouble communicating. My theory would be that Mandarin courses for English speakers is just not very demanding because of the presumption that Mandarin is a difficult language to learn for English speakers. As a result, I feel like my learning curve in Chinese will suffer while I’m here unless I find ways outside of the classroom to further develop my skills. In my experiences so far with classes, I have come to appreciate the education I am receiving back home and came to realize just how well I have been prepared to handle different academic environments. Basically #hoyasaxa