(Click play to see the video about the Global Summer Program filmed by Whichmba.net)
In recent years, the attention to China is still growing. More and more people want to know about this amazing country. This summer, over 90 students from 26 countries were here in Shanghai, to be part of the Jiaotong University Antai College summer program. Jiaotong University is a world-renowned university located in downtown Shanghai. The program has 4 components, academic lectures, corporate visits, culture activities and language learning, bringing the students a special view of Shanghai and the economy of China.
There were many amazing things about this program. One of them was the diversity of the student body. 26 countries mean 26 different cultural backgrounds and 26 ways of thinking. The students don’t even get this kind of diversity in their own school. This was very helpful in group discussion and projects. And it also felt great to know people from different countries with different perspectives.
The program had very good faculties from all over the world to tell the students what they think about China, Chinese culture and Chinese economy. But the students were doing more than just listening and taking notes. The whole program ended with presentations of group projects. The students were using what they saw and learned in the past few weeks in China to help them with the project and the discussions that came with it. For the master track students, the final project was about whether a luxury-goods company should have online stores and how to build the online platform. The students added what they learned about the Chinese economy and culture into their projects. For example, one of the groups used Wechat, a widely used Chinese social media, to help them solve the problem that the Chinese sometimes don’t trust the comments of a product from strangers.
One of the reasons that the students loved this program was there were more than just lectures, case study or projects. The cultural activities gave the student a better idea about the traditional Chinese culture through making dumplings, visiting the Chinese tempo, etc. Also, by visiting Yu Garden, the Bund and many other landmarks of Shanghai, they got to see what Shanghai and China looks like now.
These students from 26 countries learned a lot about the real China, not through smart phones or TV sets, but through actually experiencing China by themselves. The Antai college faculties prepared each student with a dinner with a local alumni family, where the students got to meet real Chinese middle-class families and hear what they had to say about this country and its growing economy. The students spoke highly of this dinner. One of the students, Nicolai Bernhard, was amazed by this experience. He saw the big apartment, the car and the huge flat-screen TV the family got, which he had none. But on the other hand, he is willing to spend more on travelling and enjoying himself. He saw the difference of culture and values. And these are the feeling you can get only when you come here and experience it yourself.
In China, the students saw that this country is developing really fast and some of its cities are comparable to American cities or European ones. Some students travelled to Beijing by train during the weekends, and the got there in just 5 hours. (Shanghai and Beijing are over 770 miles apart.) And you can have almost any kind of food you want delivered to you in Shanghai. But the real China the students were experiencing was not always fancy. They saw how big the gap was between the rich and the poor and how polluted the country was. And some of the areas, even in Shanghai, still needed to be developed.
But that is the real China and the real experience. Come here and see for yourself! You can meet intellectual people here that are just like you but with different backgrounds. You too can be part of this life-changing and thought-provoking program. And one thing is for sure: you are going to love this amazing program and this beautiful country.
