... To live one's life for more than simply getting by day to day, or in pursuit of your next purchase... to leave a ripple with each step one takes with hopes that others will feel your ripples, and in turn follow with their own, just as you've felt the ripples of someone before you, to inspire you to journey down the path you've chosen.

 This is a short story of how my journey to Tsinghua University and Beijing, China came to be.

 
RipplePath had long been my brainchild before coming to China. Ever since I decided that I was going to go abroad to learn Chinese, I had thoughts of how I would document my experiences. From my exposure to people from both sides of the world, there are a lot of misconceptions, misunderstandings and quite a cultural gap that no matter how it came about, may not be wholly deserved. I hope here to faithfully recount my life experiences (the useful portions of it) to the rest of the world to help foster a greater understanding, open-mindedness, help quell any fears/unknowns and to kindle a curiousity in this emerging country with a rich ancient history of rise and fall.

I had attempted to learn Chinese in the U.S. since middle school days to university days, but it was much too difficult. Once the courses were over, daily exposure to Chinese was very lacking. Therefore when I decided that this time, I was truly going to learn the language, I knew had to have a fully immersive experience. In addition to language exposure, I wanted cultural, historical, and social exposure to native Chinese speakers.

When choosing which country to study in, I was debating between Taiwan and China, lightly comparing the educational programs for learning Chinese. The three main cities I considered was Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing. In the end I chose Beijing, because having been to all three great cities before, I felt that Beijing offered the most historical remnants and possibly a bit more of ancient Chinese culture. Having lived around big modern cities all my life, I was looking for a place less modern and commercial with more history and character. With my shallow experiences of Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing, I felt Beijing came the closest to what  I was seeking.

Now that you know how I came to Beijing, let me mention how I came to choose Tsinghua University. I had done a bit of research on schools in Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing; however I faced great difficulty as the websites of these schools tend to be poorly designed & uninformative; many websites are in Chinese which makes it hard for a native English person to find and navigate. I called upon the help of family & friends and managed to get some more information I couldn't find online. I won't delve too deeply into schools here as that would be pages in itself. If you are interested in this information give me a gentle nudge, and I will do my best to publish my findings in that regard.

I considered four schools in Beijing for a westerner like me to learn Chinese. These four schools were Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU, 北京语言文化大学, bei³jing¹ yu³yan²wen²hua⁴da⁴xue²), Beijing University (Beida, 北京大学, bei³jing¹ da⁴xue²), Tsinghua University (Tsinghua, 清华大学, qing¹hua²da⁴xue²), and Beijing Normal University (BNU, 北京师范大学 ,bei³jing¹shi¹fan⁴da⁴xue²）. The Beida website showed that it was too late to apply for Fall Semester by the time I decided so that was the first to get knocked off my list. Next I ruled out BLCU even though I heard it had a great curriculum because I wanted to be in a school that also had local students rather than a foreigner-only school. In the end I applied for Tsinghua and BNU. But BNU gave me no choice but to Fedex them cash for the application fee after calling them several times to explain my situation,  I finally gave in and mailed cash. Not to my surprise, they later contacted me to inform me that the FedEx envelope with my application was missing the application fee. So the cash in my FedEx envelope was stolen somewhere during transit. They did  finally waive the fee for me after explaining to them that I did indeed include cash there per your request, against my repeated pleadings to send money some other way. But a university as established as them, giving foreign students no option but to mail them cash in the first place made me feel they were not fully ready to receive foreign students and I worry about my quality of life there. So I ended up going to Tsinghua. The application process was smooth and straight-forward, in addition Tsinghua's foreign student website was decently informative and useful. It had nearly all the information someone from overseas would need to know for applying, studying, living, and cost.

So now for just barely three months I have lived and studied at Tsinghua University. Each day has been packed with fun and interesting events, classes, people, sights, foods, and more. The on-campus living, eating, and shopping quality went beyond my expectations and is actually more comfortable than my American university back home. I could go on and on about what it's like, but since this is a story of how I got here, I will save that for another piece.

 I hope you enjoyed this little introduction on how I came to be where I am.

Thank you for reading,

Jean 

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