Anyone reading these blog posts must think all us StratiGrads do is travel, which obviously isn’t true. It’s been a whole month since I got back from my 5 weeks in China. Friends said to me that doing a PhD might provide opportunities to travel for conferences etc. but I didn’t quite expect this!
I applied to the Imperial International Summer School in Beijing having received an email from the Graduate School (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/international/opportunities/summer/tsinghua). Places are highly competitive and open to students in the first two years of their PhD. I fitted the criteria and have a burning desire to travel and experience new places that I couldn’t help but apply – fully expecting not to hear back. However, I received a place as a Teacher on the Tsinghua English Summer Camp and suddenly I was looking at flights to Beijing!
The first week of the trip consisted of a five-day professional skills development in co-operation with Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious universities. The whole week was dedicated to building intercultural awareness and enhancing a variety of interpersonal skills. We were teamed up with students from Tsinghua University, from a number of departments, all with very different PhD research projects to my own. Unfortunately I can’t share too many details of the activities we were required to do as they are run in future summer schools, but what I can tell you is that I had a GREAT time! We were really put to the test with different activities; team working, interviewing, communication, self-discipline, project management and creativity were all on the agenda. My team ‘Li Liang’ (力量) which means powerful force consisted of three students from Imperial and three from Tsinghua.
Discussing my research with Tsinghua students
Along with the help of Caroline, our mentor, we spent 8 hours a day on different tasks; we went from herding sheep to forming multi-national collaborative projects. It was diverse, enjoyable and challenging and I met some really interesting people. We did get a chance to escape one afternoon to visit the great wall – which really is as amazing as it looks!
The end of the week was met with sadness and excitement. Although we were leaving our new friends from Tsinghua we had another three weeks left at the University. It wasn’t all work though; I did get the opportunity to visit the sights of Beijing, the terracotta warriors in Xi’an and even scaled 100 floors of the ‘bottle opener’ in Shanghai (see respective photos).
Forbidden City in Beijing
Terracotta warriors in Xi’an
All in all an amazing experience, a big thank you to all the people I met along that way who made my stay in China awesome and thank you to Imperial and my supervisors for allowing me the opportunity to go. Now it’s time to get back to some research and a little thing called my early stage assessment. See you on the other side (hopefully!!)
Kayleigh