Wingin’ it
Today marked a somewhat scary day: having to give a presentation on our business plan to bring a foreign company into Japan. As part of my International Business minor, I had to take this Global Management class as a required credit, and this was our final project.
The longer I study abroad, the more I discover who I am and my true passions. For example, I’m steadily realizing how little interest I have in business and more on social interactions and communications, and telling stories. Though I understood very little of the business material we spoke about in class, I fancied all the words spoken. While I came off nervous, which I was, bullshitting seemed to come naturally when my ass needed it. To add to seeming like I knew what was happening, I paid extra attention to other students’ presentations to ask inquisitive questions, though they were really simple.
During the half way coffee break, I was preparing to leave class so I can finish business and prepare for my mother’s visit in Hong Kong. Before walking out of class, the professor stops me to say, “You are very good at what you do, keep working at it.” I responded to this with a confused “What does that mean?” and he seemed to think I was fine. He just kept repeating that I think, speak and process information well and I should “keep working at it”. Still bewildered, I raised an eyebrow, half smiled and proceeded to going home.
I would say I’m the kind of person who can be decent at mostly anything I put my hands on, but I can be great at something for which I have a passion. Unfortunately, I’m finding out business or political studies are both equally uninteresting although all of my classes here are in those subjects. Meanwhile, I’ll still be blabbering, aka, blogging about the thought process of it all. What the professor said to me today was certainly odd, but a part of me is kind of glad he said it. He’s not my favorite professor, but it provided an ounce of affirmation that I’m not all too terrible at this, even if I hated it.
Confusion
Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I love living in Hong Kong and experiencing everything abroad, but the academic aspect leaves me bewildered and confused. I have no passion in political science or business. Okay, I whole-heartedly dislike politics regardless of its importance, and I’m only interested in business because of what my parents intend for me in the future with their current ventures.
I’m frustrated that I can’t be as good a student as I have the potential to if I was back in Syracuse taking regular classes that interest me. This makes me sound bratty, but I’m just realizing more and more that I simply can’t focus on where my heart isn’t. People choose to do certain things because they know this is what they do best or at least love to do — I’m doing neither in school. I wish I wasn’t as clueless or lost.
Orientation & Preparation
Like many other Syracuse students who’ve been on the abroad program, we all have the same critiques: orientations are terrible. I can’t fathom how years of the same program haven’t improved the way they run this, or if this is the improved version.
Our first orientation which happened before leaving to mainland China was hours too long. The way this semester is set up is we begin with Module A, the spring seminar in China. Module B is our classes and finals. Module C is the last five weeks spent either as a full-time intern or as an independent study researcher. During orientation, we spent one hour going over ALL the prospective internship positions and companies, information that are useless to students who know they want to do independent study (me). All of this only for our director to note how difficult it is to land one in tough economic times, especially when our Chinese is not particularly strong, and most may want to switch to research papers. Well then, what the flying dumpling.
The one thing I did enjoy was taking a tour through the school by local City University student ambassadors. Their facilities are way more modern than I could ever imagine, including a student lounge which resembles a coffee shop among other amenities. Did I mention our school is located across the street from a fancy mall and that they are connected through a tunnel? Unfortunately, our tour also lasted way too long, two days after we arrived to HK. The last tour was around our hotel in which some ambassadors got lost. So you can imagine that by the time 4 pm rolled around and I’d done nothing but sit all of first half of the day and walked all the second half combined with a terrible 13-hour jetlag, I was very unhappy.
Our second day of class preparations was today, where we sat and listened to more prospective employers talked, watched a ridiculously common sense video of how to use a gym (i.e. “On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest amount of energy and 10 being extreme, you should exercise at a level between 4 to 7,”) got lectured on what to wear to interviews and picked up our textbooks. This lasted from 9 am to 3 pm which could have taken fifteen minutes at most. I wasn’t really planning on using the gym so I demanded my deposit back, then felt my life wasting away listening to more tips on getting an internship in Asia which I really didn’t want to hear. Yes, apparently, getting an internship here is different, and I’m not saying I never want to work here in the future but the stuff we were advised were so common sense, I wanted to beat myself in the head.
“Girls, don’t wear low cut shirts … maybe you should consider high heels shoes or formal flats … don’t arrive too early,” etc. As a college junior, I find this almost offensive how clueless they think we are. Not to mention the director totally dissed my outfit today seeing how I was wearing a fitted high waist denim skirt (it came down to just above the knee) with a red book bag and she lectured “Don’t wear bright, attractive colors. If you wear a skirt, it must cover your knee or lower and not be too tight”.
I should have just woken up at 1 pm, get a snack and headed over to the school to pick up my books and go home. SU is gonna hear it from me when we evaluate, which I hope we totally get to do!
