Pieces of Advice

I want to leave this blog with something useful. If you’re a future light fellow reading this, you won’t want to read father than this post for advice, so here it is.

Spending time abroad is an incredible experience. It can teach you about language, it can teach you about a new culture. But you know all this; you’ve heard it before.

What they don’t tell you is that it can be the excuse to learn something independent of the foreign country you spend fourteen hours on a plane traveling to. It can teach you about people in general, and about yourself. This summer I showed up to Taipei without a place to stay or a friend in Taiwan. All I had in my backpack was Light Fellowship money, an electronic dictionary, and a camera. In the weeks that followed I found an apartment I adored as a matter of course, learned how to cook out of necessity, learned how to take pictures per demand, and made friends to enjoy. Though Chinese was the tool I used to obtain these, they had nothing to do with language itself. However, they’re things that make a summer fulfilling, and skills I wouldn’t have learned anywhere else. My heaviest suggestion is to carry no reserves in making your time abroad as full as possible, in whatever ways you see fit. Carefree summers with money in your pocket and unlimited potential still within yourself aren’t unlimited, and taking advantage of every whim is the only way to live, for now.


My Chinese was taken to a whole new level while in Taiwan, from studying Chinese to now speaking it. Any decent program will give you this, though – to future Light Fellows, comparisons are crucial.

As far as the cities are concerned, Taiwan is much more modernized than Beijing, and has a far more “Western” feel, meaning it is likely more comfortable to live in. However, I still am a proponent of starting studying abroad in Mainland China for these main reasons:
1. As much as I hate to admit it, it’s important to get a strong foundation in standard Mandarin Chinese before exposing yourself to variations.
2. Less English is spoken in mainland China, which will force you to use Chinese everyday.
3. The Beijing programs have language pledges, which are especially important for second- and third-year students.
4. Beijing is more historic, and the city in itself can give you a brief overview of recent Chinese history.
5. Food is less westernized in Beijing, forcing you to really dive into authentic Chinese cuisine. This might not be great for long-term, but the way I see it, learning how to use chopsticks and scream at the waiters for two more bowls of rice is a certain rite of passage.

However, this isn’t to say my Taiwan experience wasn’t better than the one in Beijing. I went to Taiwan to figure out if I could stand living in a foreign country on my own, and it was a perfect program to do so. ICLP gives the sort of independence and freedom that is unheard of in the Beijing programs – that is, instead of a dormitory, I had an apartment, and instead of constantly being after me to do homework and testing me, they took a “do it if you want approach.” Things like this go a long way to give you a chance to really live in the city, instead of simply studying in a dorm that happens to be in Beijing. ICLP is also a fantastic program for students who want to focus on their speaking abilities, and has several classes to choose from to fit rather specific interests.


Further, I couldn’t be more pleased with the teachers’ willingness to step away from the textbook and lend unbelievable amounts of support with whatever you wish to pursue. In my unique case, the head teachers Professor Chen and Professor Fann bent over backwards to give us the opportunity to compete in the Beijing competition. Professor Chen spent late nights organizing the logistics for our trips to Hong Kong and Beijing, and Professor Fann spent countless afternoons helping us prepare for the competition, and all of this was purely out of their desire to help us succeed. Besides them, Professor Hu dropped everything she was doing in Taipei to personally escort us to Beijing and assist us in whatever we needed throughout each day. This sort of support, coupled with other teachers’ acceptance of talking about and studying things outside the textbook (for example, one of my teachers lent me Harry Potter in Chinese, and we discussed it throughout one week), is better than I could have ever hoped for. It’s these things that make me believe that the teachers at ICLP are really in this for you, and for this reason I couldn’t recommend them higher.

That said, the program does have drawbacks. The main problem with ICLP the people who attend ICLP. Coming from Princeton in Beijing last summer and Yale for the past two years, I’m quite used to a very homogeneous student body – young, overly motivated undergraduate students interested in the academic side of Chinese. ICLP was a shock because that group was in fact the minority – the program was rather full of graduate students and unexpected over-thirty’s who already work in the real world. I won’t say that they aren’t motivated, but their goals are very different from that of mine, and from that of the average Yale undergraduate. They aren’t on scholarship, thus paying for the program on their own, and further don’t need the class for credit and have no GPA connected with the classes. As a result, they aren’t willing to subject themselves to the overly rigorous curriculum that PiB and HBA, for example, enforce. They want to learn whatever suits their interests, and at their own pace. ICLP knows this, and caters to this type of student. Thus, classes can move painfully slow and seem lax in form. For example, we had no tests or quizzes, no responsibility to learn to read or write characters (some students only knew pinyin – the phonetic, Romanized version of characters), and no homework to speak of. This irked all of the Yale students, and almost every one of us requested to be put in more difficult classes. In the end, they responded that we should focus more on our speaking and then reconsider. This would be a fine and dandy response, mind you, if we were not returning to study at Yale. Because we are, we personally need to make sure we stay on par with all of the other Yale students studying abroad – they did not recognize this, and it was often frustrating. However, doing extra work such as the competition, writing for the school newspaper, and doing extra reading can add excellent support to bolster your ICLP education – if you’ve got the motivation.

As crucial as comparisons are, it’s even more crucial not to over do it. If I could give myself one piece of advice going into this summer again, it would be to trust the program’s methods and not constantly taking time to note if they meet the standards of another’s. No matter how silly or how ineffective a language program seems, looking back I could have accomplished much more diving right in from the beginning. This has been a problem for me in the past, and something I still need to work on. Coming from several programs in the past, it’s easy to compare programs – while this is healthy, it shouldn’t detract from what you’re putting in to the one you’re in currently.

Finally, my last line of advice is to not stop at your one summer abroad. Even only listening to Dr. Light speak but once this past spring, through listening to him and through my own experiences, I’ve realized though one summer abroad will do wonders for your “citizen of the world” status and understanding of the language, stopping there would undermine the entire purpose of this fellowship. That is, the goal is not only to understand the language and culture, but also to use what you know to make the world a better place. Lofty ideals and cheesy words, I know, but if anyone can do it, it’s us.

How? One group I highly recommend to go along with the fellowship is Yale Reach Out. I’ve gone with them to both Beijing and Sichuan, China to teach and do service projects. During these adventures I was able to take the Chinese language and cultural exposure I had gained and use them to do something real, and something to bring the Eastern and Western cultures together, if only one step at a time. These two week trips either over spring break or during summer vacation currently don’t have much funding, but hopefully one day the Light Fellowship will realize how useful programs like this are, and fund a trip themselves.


Besides actually going abroad, taking a class related to something you found interesting abroad can be a lot of fun, and will be motivating. For example, after last year I was interested in the intersection between art and culture in Asian art because of a few museums I visited. I decided to take a course called “Chinese Art in the Modern World” in the spring, and it ended up being one of my favorite classes I’ve ever had. This was first because I was motivated as a result of having an interest in it, and I was also able to relate what we talked about in class with what I had experienced in China. Rolling the Fellowship experience back into Yale in this way is exactly a main goal of the fellowship, and I recommended it highly.

Nike might as well have been talking about studying abroad when they declared, “Just Do It.” That’s how it all starts, and that’s how it becomes something good. Don’t miss this opportunity.