The Gilman Scholarship

One of the reasons that it is even possible for me to be going to Beijing this fall is the Gilman Scholarship. When I had tried to participate in a study abroad to China during 2010, I was intensively searching for scholarships to fund my travel. That year, I applied for the Boren Scholarship, a Federal Government award of up to $10,000 a semester in exchange for 2 years of public sector service (i.e. working for the State Department). At the time I was confident I might get it, but when I didn't, I went searching for others. So it was that last year I found the Gilman Scholarship, but regretfully I discovered after the application deadline.

Once I had decided that I would again try to study abroad in 2011, I had a better base of funding options available. I applied for the Boren Scholarship again, but since the award statistic is about 16% (1 in every 6 applicants gets the scholarship) I didn't get my hopes up. I did, however, apply for the Gilman Scholarship by the deadline. The maximum reward is $5,000 a semester, with a chance for a $3,000 increase if you are studying a critical language (as determined by the State Department). They also calculate in financial need and instead of service time afterwards, the agreement is that recipients become the marketing strategy of the program. Student outline a "follow-on" project that they will complete upon returning to the States, something that promotes studying abroad, their specific program, and funding through the Gilman Scholarship.

When applying for the Gilman, I had considerably greater hopes because the recipient ratio is almost 1:2. Thankfully, I was one of the recipients with a reward of $2,500, which in truth is making this opportunity possible for me.

What you'll be able to see on this blog in the future is part of my "follow-on" project. I agreed with Gilman that I will make little documentary vignettes of different encounters as an American student in Beijing. Some of these videos will cater specifically to attending to CNU, like "Where do I sign up for classes" and others will be more generic, like understanding the bus systems around the city. I'll be posting the videos as often as possible on my Explorer Michael's YouTube Channel.

The Gilman Scholarship is not just for studying in China, but applies to students everywhere that are going... everywhere! Please check it out at http://www.iie.org/Programs/Gilman-Scholarship-Program.

Where in Beijing?

Everything is arranged and paid for... expect where I'm going to live. The university was offering dorms to us international students, however, it was going to cost $410 USD/month per person to live there. Lacey and I have a hard time swallowing $820 USD a month as an acceptable rent price. I've been looking for apartments around the area that are suitable, and turns out that a reasonable place can be found for 2000 RMB (=$310 USD).

Since Beijing is a city of about 19 million people, saying that you will live in Beijing is vague at best, and if you were to tell that to a property broker, expect a quizzical look and barrage of questions.

Beijing is divided into 14 districts ( 区 qū) and 2 counties. We will be located in the district of Haidian ( 海淀 Hǎidiàn) which on this picture is the blue sector to the top-left of the central red sector. Haidian is the educational district of the city. I believe that Beijing has somewhere around 67 formal universities. Well, being equipped with the knowledge that I was going to need to look for an apartment in Haidian, I felt confident in the results of my search.

Turns out, Haidian is still ginormous. By itself, it has around 2.1 million people, and that was according to the 2000 census. It can be further broken down into 29 smaller districts, each of which may be colloquially referred to as a 'town' (no doubt an understatement). In my housing search I was then faced with finding which of those sectors was close to CNU, so that we could try and find an apartment close to campus. Turns out there are about five.

紫竹桥 Zǐzhúqiáo

航天桥 Hángtiānqiáo (Space Bridge)

车道沟 Chēdàogōu
万寿寺 Wànshòusì (Manjuji)
车公庄 Chēgōngzhuāng

The reason for knowing these is because when searching for a place to live, most housing boards are naturally going to whittle the search down to specific areas. A site that I've been using to search for housing is http://beijing.haozu.com/. I like it because the filters are clear and accurate, and practically every post I've seen is provided with pictures of the apartment and maps of the local area. If you are not very savvy on Mandarin, don't worry, it translates quite nicely through translate.google.com.

If you want to see where that campus of CNU is at, and thus the general vicinity where we will be living, click on the location link in the footer of this post. I tacked it to the right spot.
 

What am I doing in Beijing?

I have already received some questions from my friend, Herbert Nagamatsu. I feel foolish that I didn't answer some of these sooner.

Q: How long will you be there?

A: Four months. We leave the States on the 17 of August and fly back on the 19th of December.

Q: Will you be working there, teaching English, or doing anything else?

A: Lacey and I will both be attending Capital Normal University. I am going with Brigham Young University - Idaho. This is actually a pilot trip for them, so I'm excited to be in the first group to go. While at CNU, we will be taking intensive language classes. In addition to the language curriculum, we will have instruction in Chinese culture and literature. From what I know, we will be in language class four hours, five days a week.

In addition to schooling, I am going to be executing two projects simultaneously. I will be collecting data for a research project focusing on teacher-student communication at the university, research that I hope to present in 2012 at the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (WCAAS) which will be hosted by BYU-Idaho. The second project is part of a scholarship I received from the Gilman International Scholarship program. I will be filming small documentary vignettes about the student life in Beijing, and other practical scripts like getting a taxi, ordering food, etc.

Thanks for the questions Herbert!

Questions and Misconceptions

While I'm in China, I will be carrying around a little notebook that I can fill with questions as they occur to me. In my past experiences, I had questions when I encountered something new, but it didn't take long before I took it for granted without discovering more of the why behind it. I'm determined to not let it happen this time and I want to extend this opportunity to you all as well.

If you have questions or have heard rumors of "They say in China that..." I want to hear what those are, then I'll don my Sherlock Holmes cap and do what I can to verify if those conceptions are true, and try to answer your questions. You can share your questions and conceptions with me by replying to this post, or you can email them to me at ExplorerMichael@gmail.com. Once I find out, I'll post the answers on the blog.

First Post

Time is disappearing as we get closer to our departure date for China. We are going to be leaving Des Moines, IA in our air-condition-less car on Monday, August 8^th and drive to Salt Lake City, UT. There we will say hi and bye to some friends and family, and drive to Rexburg. After making a deposit to our storage unit and some more hi’s and bye’s, we will drive to Spokane, WA and spend some time with the in-laws, who will graciously accompany us the remainder of the way to Seattle. The cheapest tickets to Beijing were out of Seattle, so we planned this road trip accordingly.

The fateful day is Wednesday, August 17, we board the planes, make a quick stop in San Fran then off to Beijing. The reality is definitely starting to hit. A feeling of nostalgia that has been creeping up on me and is none too pleasant is that of my first months in Argentina. When I was in the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT, they do their best to inundate you with as much vocabulary and grammar as you can possibly retain… and then some. However, compared to the linguistic dexterity required when you arrive in the country… Well, it’s like trying to teach someone to swim by correspondence. At full throttle it took about 3 months to reach low-level fluency in Spanish, and Mandarin is significantly more challenging, so here’s hoping that 4 months in Beijing will prove sufficient time to see some of it come to conversational fruition.