Responsibilty and hope

Responsibilty and hope

2010012548 经06 高金松I’ve long believed that seeing is not believing, but seeing helps reduce misunderstanding. After nearly one month’s visiting Columbia University and seeing how the academic research is going on, how students are studying and how the society looks like.

Before setting off, we’re encouraged by many friends and teachers and also given kind suggestions. I remember clearly that one teacher says,’you are all from top universities in China, and you will be the image of Chinese students in our foreign friends’ eyes.’ I certainly know what this means, for having the experience of receiving foreign students in THU. I started to discipline myself. And my principle is being true to myself, and try to keep active, keep energetic and experience as much as possible. I will be friendly with my friends, reliable to my teammates, responsible to myself. And in class, I will be assertive and proactive, I’ll get people around me talking when I get any chance. Leaving a good image of myself, my uni, and on a macro level, my country has been my responsibility.

Being a student, I don’t need to behave like an ambassador, but I also have to believe every word I say, and everything I do. Being student, I cannot bring too much influence to my American friends in many ways, and the best way is to keep keen on knowledge, and study hard there.

After all, this is a precious opportunity.

Leaving Beijing, I started my trip to fulfill my responsibility. July 6th, the first day in new York, doesn’t bring me the ecstasy I expected. I was happy about my state, because I was here to experience, not to have fun. But still, I was very happy that my fellow visitors and I had been warmly received by the assistants there. And the busy life just started with the comfortable rest and sweet dream of hope.

The first lecture I receive was truly familiar to me. I had taken introduction to psychology in THU, and professor talked a lot about the differences in east and west culture, the knowledge overlapped in many ways. This reminds to think about one thing that professor said about china’s rising to a super power, that culture may be most important reason to explain its way of development of economy. So to know and study about the differences in these two totally different yet miraculously strongly related cultures(due to the contemporary culture exchange), is a very important approach to understand the dispute frequently occurring between China and western countries, especially China and America. And the most direct way is to understand how people’s mind work, that is exactly what psychology is about.

The campus tour led me through the accumulation of the essence. The artistic buildings and the mixture of old and new and the borderless campus has implied the openness of the uni. I’ve seen many campuses, I

still believe THU’s is the most beautiful, and I think it’s natural to love one’s own uni’s campus. And I enjoyed the campus of comlubia university, too, because it was the one I’d be staying for the second longest time. I am really thankful to my guide who patiently and vividly introduced the history, the famous people, the beautiful buildings on the campus to us. And we talked not only about things like what we liked to do, we went deeper on topics like china’s housing price and Chinese people’s attitudes towards America and her crisis and hope, which they wanted to know, and America’s performance and recovering from the financial crisis and its influence on average people, which we’re eager to know. We also exchanged ideas about our understanding and question about some famous theories written in the text book. However, I had to admit, that generally we Chinese students believed in what the text book says way deeper than Columbia Uni students. Sometimes we believed without thinking about it. I was sure this was bad and I had to keep alert in the future when I decide to accept or abandon an idea.

As arranged, I attended a discussion about the second round of the business case analysis competition. The discussion went in a heated atmosphere but we had a great time because with the guidance from the teaching assistants, I get to analyze the cases in a more orderly way. We’d broken down the big cases into many small pieces so that it became easier for us to analyze and to find a solution. After an hour’s

discussion, we were divided into 2 groups, one assigned to work on the text and materials, on working on the powerpoint and presentation.

On July 9th, we had an exciting visit to the United States Military Academy at West Point and West Point Museum. I have never been to a military academy in China. The introduction made by the stuff interested me so much. I have learned a lot from it which I can’t obtain in ordinary classes. What’more, on July 13th, we did some team games at the Central Park that is a fantastic park for walking. The team game benefited a lot to me since it helped me to learn how to communicate and cooperate with teammates. As we all know, people should help each other in the process. Through the game, I got to know much more about my teammates.

To be honest, I want to have a trip to the Wall Street since I got to USA. The Wall Street is one of the most important financial centers in the world and I dream of working in the Wall Street one day. On July 14th, we got to the Wall Street. First of all, we went to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Museum of Finance. You can imagine how excited I am since I heard these places every day in the newspaper or other media, but I have never seen them before. Then we took the subway to Bloomberg which I knew it was the most famous financial medium in the world. On that afternoon, we visited the Statue of Liberty which is an outstanding handicraft sent by French. We discussed about the

construction of the Statue of Liberty and the history of America. At last, we walked from the port to the 21st Century Shopping Center and did some shopping. In a word, I think this is really a perfect day.

On July 18th, we did another team game in front of Low Library in the Columbia University. The teaching assistant Sakiko and Nelson split our group into two subgroups. Then we did some activities and I got a lot of help from the assistants. They are really helpful. On that afternoon, we had a trip to IBM and did some fieldwork at IBM Global Business Service. This is the first time I got into the famous company and we took many photos in the front of the company.

After the brief introduction to finance engineering, today’s lecture seems like a greater challenge for me . professor Karl Sigman lectured abour Monte-Carlo Simulation&Binomial lattice model for stock prices which require some mathematical background, thanks to the math courses I took back in THU, I got myself attentive in the class, and found the lecture really interesting.

The following day, we got unique opportunity to have a visit to the United Nations. You can imagine how significant the building of UN is. After lunch, we gathered in the Duke Street and visited UBS. In this famous company, everyone was working hard. Some were working at the computer and some were discussing hotly in the reference room. Everyone was so busy that they had little time for a rest. I knew that

some of my classmates in SEM in Tsinghua University would work in such company in the future. As I know, this kind of work is usually hard but the employer is able to obtain quite high salary from the hard work. Of course, the working environment in UBS is perfect. People here worked comfortably. I think I maybe enjoy such kind of work when I graduate from the Tsinghua University. After all, it is a good job for me I think.

As we all know, some students choose to work on a master degree or a doctor degree and some choose to work for a company or government after graduation. So I thought it is useful to get some advice from the senior. And I learned a lot from the Stern Business School Information Session of MBA Program.

Everything has to come to an end, and everything will end when it’s perfect. If it’s not perfect, it is not the end. I have to say with my leaving America, the visit is ended, but what doesn’t end is my hope and my ambition. I will go to more places, to see more and communicate with more people, to think more and spread our Chinese great culture to more people.

This is my responsibility and hope.