Finally, we got to hear the tech presentation, and it was very interesting. We learned all about setting up a VPN and how unreliable certain aspects of China and its internet are. Anecdotally, I remember a friend telling me of her times visiting China and how the government simply turns off certain websites when it … Continue reading Jake’s Week 6 Pre-Trip Blog →

Today was safety training day. In short, we reviewed a lot of information that was on the application to go abroad, but the program seemed to want us to hear it verbally. We also continued with some more of the presentations. One that was really interesting to me was the Current Events presentation, though because … Continue reading Jake’s Week 5 Pre-Trip Blog →

Today was pretty much just the volunteer committee presentations. It was cool to hear from everyone, especially given how many of us tried to say something in Chinese and having no idea how. There were some particularly interesting groups. I thought it was very interesting to see the statistics and culture surrounding the one-child policy, … Continue reading Jake’s Week 4 Pre-Trip Blog →

Today we got to meet Ulyssia, one of our chaperones. She’s been to China before and has experience in professional development so it’ll be really nice to have her along and hear about her experiences. After she presented, we got a relatively detailed itinerary, detailing where we’re going and when. On it are two cities … Continue reading Jake’s Week 3 Pre-Trip Blog →

This week we got a lot more detailed about the trip and the class. I learned about the different teams that we’ll have for class presentations and they seem both interesting and useful. We started the session by talking about our professional brands and how we’ve been reviewed. It brought me back to last summer, … Continue reading Jake’s Week 2 Pre-Trip Blog →

The most important part of this week was that the trip actually felt real today. It was interesting to hear from everyone all of the different things that we are both excited for and anxious about. For example, there is a good divide of people who hate mornings and are worried about the wear and … Continue reading Jake’s Week 1 Pre-Trip Blog →