National Security Language Initiative for Youth Chinese Summer 2018
Since there's not much to talk about for 6/19, I'll include some of my experience today to make up for it :)
6/19 was the second day of PDO! We had to be downstairs by 7:30 so we could walk to breakfast at the iEARN building. After that, we mainly just had meetings all day! We got to meat an FSO, and she was really great! She has worked in India and Bangladesh, as well as the Peace Corps in Thailand. I got her card! After out 9-5 meetings, we got to go out for dinner. A group of us went to Pret a Manger, kinda like a french Panera. After that we went and got Pinkberry. Then we walked like half a mile to this Walgreens ripoff to get some food. Our RD was still out by 10, so for the rest of the night we just chilled in the lounge :) This morning we had to be downstairs by 4:30 am, so we could catch our 8:30 flight to San Fran. We just landed like an hour ago, so we got food at this Japanese place (I got Gyudon). We are in the part of SFO where all the East Asian flights leave, so it literally feels like one foot in Asia one foot in America here. All the signs are in Japanese, every other flight is ANA, and everyone is speaking Japanese or Chinese. They just announced final boarding fr a flight to Shanghai, bittersweet that it is so close but so far... That's where we are now! Our flight is delayed so we just chillin. Let you know any other developments :)
1 Comment
Heads up- this is about yesterday the 18th and I don't have a lot of time to write this :) Yesterday was an amazing day!!! Even though it started out kinda rocky with different flights, it ended up being a great day.
So the flights for NSLIY are different person to person flying to New York, but for us the arrival times were anywhere from 9am to 4pm. They had one person even stay overnight in Houston and one more person take a red eye from California lol! My point being is that most of the beginning of the day was just arrive from your flight, meet the people who were there, hang out, and repeat. Colton and I were pretty hungry so we went to the bodega to get massive samosas (delicious!!!). On the shuttle they have for you from the airport, there are usually other NSLIYers on it too! Colton and I rode the same shuttle with two other kids on the Hindi program to Pune, India. They were cool! We found out that one of them was dared to apply to NSLIY 36 hours before the deadline, and she got in! So after Colton and I got to Columbia by like 3:30, we had some time before we went to dinner. So we got our OPI scores, walked around campus with a couple of other people, and got samosas :) After that, we just hung out in the dorms watching the people trickle in. Once it was dinner time, I'd say 95% of the people were there. The Chicago flight and shuttle had some issues, so they got there at like 7pm lol. We had pizza in the giant Columbia lawn between the library and rotunda. After that, we did some ice-breakers and then we were free to roam the city! A big group of us went to get bubble tea (of course), and then everyone splintered off except Sophia, Bethany, and I. I knew them pretty well just through the group chat, so it was super cool to see them in person! We walked down to Central Park and looped around through Morningside Park! We had a blast just walking around the city (we even went in HMart lol). After that, it was starting to rain so we all went inside. Some of the guys wanted umbrellas, so we made a dash to the Walgreen's I think? and bought umbrellas, cards, and candy. It was like 9pm now and lights out was at 10, so we just chilled downstairs and played different card games until it was time. After lights out pretty much half of us were up, so we just video called until like 11:30. I hope we didn't keep anyone up! But that was yesterday, and it was reaallly great! Now today is presentation day! We have a couple of alums and program directors who are gonna give us a lot of presentations about like safety, how to be a good host student, etc. It should be great! See you for my blog post about today :) The day of reckoning is finally here :)It's day one of PDO!!!!! It's 7 am and I'm still in Atlanta, so I'll do a full day blog post later tonight! I haven't posted in a while and I've kinda just been lazy, so this post is half update post half hype post!!! Refresher for those unfamiliar, PDO stands for Pre-Departure Orientation, where me basically all go to Columbia University for two days. We meet each other for the first time, some alums give some presentations, and we get lectured about safety and stuff. It's a really fun way to start the trip because a) I love Columbia and b) It'll be cool to meet everyone that I only know virtually! So a couple of day ago, I did get my host fam info!!! It is a mother and father with two sons, one is 20 who is in University in Taipei, and the other is 18 and lives with the parents. They seem really cool! I reached out a couple days ago by email and I gave the host mom my Line. She reached out to me on Line last night and we have been chatting back and forth through the night :) That was about the only update oops... I guess I really do blog too much LOL. Well I don't think I have talked about my sendoff party yet, that was a lot of fun!! Thanks for everyone who came! Now for the hype part. Like the night before PDO, a lot of people write about how excited they are. I'll be honest with you guys, I was just too tired haha. I guess I'll do it now!! Words cannot describe the feelings I am feeling. While on one hand I'm so ready to get out of Atlanta, it's sad to leave my family and friends. The overwhelming feeling tho is excitement! This is uncharted territory even for me, and I'm just pumped to experience it with such amazing people! I'm excited to meet my host fam, go back to Taiwan, learn exponentially more Chinese, but most of all, I'm most excited to meet these people I've grown so close to in these last couple of months even just from behind a phone screen. They are all so unique and funny, and they are just amazing people. In just a few short hours, I'll be able to meet them face to face! So overall: excited to trek into the unknown :) Oh! There's another update! I went to Chicago!!! I vlogged the whole thing but the footage was super ratchet, so I just used it to practice vlogging the real thing. Trust me, I'm already vlogging at the airport today! The biggest news from my trip tho by far was getting to meet Buddy, another NSLIY finalist on my program!! He was super nice and it was great to hang with him and his friends in his stomping grounds. In Chicago the government throws money at education (sounds familiar), but mainly into public selective enrollment schools. His school literally is a Castle it's insane. But we went for pizza and it was delicious :) That's about it guys! My flight takes off at 10:45, so I still have oodles of time (its 8:10 rn lol). Idk what I'm gonna do, but I'm just excited to get to NYC already!!! Bye guys and see you for my post tonight :)
Finally!!!NSLIY just gave us our flight itineraries! It's actually not what any of us expected lol. I'll walk you through it for those unfamiliar with airport codes :) I1) Flying out of Atlanta (ATL)
This wasn't a shocker lol. I live about 45 minutes from ATL, so this is always my home airport. 2) Flying into Newark (EWR) For the unacquainted, all of the NSLIY Chinese programs have PDO (Pre-Departure Orientation) for 2 days at Columbia University. The kids fly solo from wherever they live to get here; meaning individual itineraries for each kid. For me that means flying into Newark (EWR), which is an airport I don't think I've been to. They shuttle us from the airports to Columbia. I luckily got a morning flight, meaning I'll get to Columbia sometime in the afternoon. This is good so I don't miss the first get-to-know-you dinner :) 3) Layover in San Francisco (SFO) After PDO, all of the NSLIY kids take one flight to the host country with our RD (resident director). Since there are few nonstop flights from America to Taiwan, there's usually a layover. We all thought the layover would be in Tokyo (NRT) like all of the previous Kaohsiung programs, but I guess they wanted to mix it up this year and we got San Francisco. Kinda sad I won't go back to Japan, but we wouldn't have left the airport anyways. 4) Final Destination: Taipei! (TPE) This was another shocker! Since the pervious program layover destination was in Japan, they had been able to fly nonstop to Kaohsiung. This year, I guess the only choice is to fly into Taipei! I'm excited since there is a bullet train the runs from Taipei to Kaohsiung, so maybe we will get to ride it :) Also, my avid blog readers will know I have been to Taipei before, so I am excited to be back! My return itinerary is an exact carbon copy of my itinerary going there, so no surprises there. I will get home 11:59pm Sunday night, ready for my first day of school the next day :) Thanks for reading! I know it was a short post, but I'm planning to write again once I get my host family stuff any day now. My party is this Saturday too! Maybe I will post some pics. For now, so long! Its 4 AM June 4, officially 2 weeks away!!!
But that's not what this post is about! It's about packing for your NSLIY adventure! This is mainly a post for NSLIY soon-to-be participants, but if you are just interested, feel free to read!
Packing for a 7 week government sponsored trip is harder than it sounds (and it already sounds pretty hard I think). Luckily, I'm a good packer! And I have resources. NSLIY did have a packing list and a sort of what-to-do-when page in our student handbook that has been suuper helpful! I modified their packing list and added some stuff using this website, an online packing list maker. My plan is to list out my packing list, explain some stuff that needs description, and at the bottom list the stuff I still need to do to prepare for my trip!
My Packing List
To-Dos
Clothes I opted to bring clothes for 5-7 days, that might fluctuate depending on the room in my suitcase. Worst comes to worst, I can buy some clothes there.
Gear
Electronics
Washbag
Documents (and a lot of em)
First Aid Kit
That's it for the packing list! Now let's see about all the other stuff I have to do before I go! (I do highly recommend Packtor tho, it asks you a bunch of questions like "male or female?", "where are you going", and "for how long?" and basically makes you a packing list. All I did was modify theirs with the extra stuff NSLIY wanted me to bring. Things to Do!
That's all for tonight! You can tell the trip is getting closer by how often I am posting lol! Again, don't forget to subscribe for email updates every time a new post comes out, and feel free to check the other pages of my blog! I added one tonight that's basically every NSLIY vlog I've seen for the Chinese program! Other than that, thanks for reading and have a good night! It's 3 am and raining... AKA the perfect time to write :)I've been particularly bored tonight, so I thought I would write a little before I went to bed in a couple of hours. I just went on a walk in my neighborhood to get some inspiration, and in the end I decided to write about my Chinese experience in the last two years up to NSLIY. I'll talk a little about my NSLIY application process too if you are interested in that. There haven't been too many program updates, so I'll save them for a later post. In about a week I'm supposed to hear about my flight itinerary and my host family, so stay tuned :) Where to begin... I guess I'll start with talking about how I even got into Chinese in the first place. There is no clear cut moment of inspiration, but I guess a lot of little moments that influenced me to try it out. My earliest memory of hearing about learning Chinese was probably from my dad when I was six or seven. He told me I should learn Chinese because it would be the "global language of business in this century". I told him that was stupid and I went off to learn German for some reason (and failed). Going through how the image of China has changed in my mind throughout my life is a bit excessive, so I guess I'll skip to the summer before I decided to take Chinese I. It was the summer before 8th grade, and back then I was really into learning Japanese. I loved Japan and everything about it (yea I was kind of a weeb). Anyways, learning Japanese I guess was my focus in life at that point. I was pretty upset that my school didn't offer Japanese, so I decided one faithful day, sitting in Panera alone, that I would fill out the google form that I had an "interest in taking Chinese", in my mind the next best thing. Now for some background about the Chinese department at my school. Our department is small and surely underfunded, but it is fully developed. We have Chinese I through V and AP. We have one teacher for the whole department. The one thing that is unique to our school's Chinese program (and Latin) is that they have an opportunity for the 8th graders at the feeder schools to take Chinese I as a zero-period before school starts. You have to drive to the high-school, but a bus takes you back to the middle school after the class is over. Me, the high-achieving eighth grader I was, decided to do this. It turned out to be one of the best ideas I have had. Chinese I was not only unbelievably easy, but also fun. I think there were only like 12 of us with the one teacher, who might be the nicest person in the universe. Anyways, the 12 of us formed a real bond taking this easy course with no tests and many movie days. Even though I did spend the first few months trying to connect what I was learning with Japanese, I had a fun time and learned a lot about Chinese and China as a whole. The class almost made it worth it to get up every morning :) If you are considering taking Chinese I right now, do it!!! I can't assure you it will be as easy as my school was, but I can assure you it will be every bit as interesting! At the end of my Chinese I year, I had a big decision to make. Since I took Chinese I before school, my eighth grade year was still open to take a language at the middle school: either Spanish or French. I ended up taking French with Chinese I that year. But now that I was going into high school, 2 AP classes and honors everything else for my freshman year, I would have to drop either French or Chinese so I wouldn't have to take a zero period freshman year too. It was a really hard decision, but ultimately I chose to continue Chinese and drop French. I can't exactly tell you why, but it just felt right. Another great decision for my part. I'll put my 8th grade and 9th grade classes below so you can see what I'm talking about visually.
One other thing happened my freshman year that had a big impact on my life: I got to visit Japan for 3 weeks in the winter. It was an awesome trip, I got to see Japan, practice my Japanese, and have a nice winter vacation from school for a couple days. A few weeks before our trip, my dad and I decided to extend our trip by a week, but we wanted to do something with that week that would be meaningful. First thing we thought of was going to the beach in Okinawa, so we added Okinawa. As you might guess though there aren't many flights from Okinawa to Atlanta, so we had to find somewhere after Okinawa to fly home from. Our final choice: Taipei, Taiwan. Yes, I did get to see the country I will be living in all summer for a few days last year. I like to think of it as a preview. While we didn't get out of Taipei, I thought Taiwan was nice! It was a mixed bag of good and bad, but you'll get that anywhere. Looking back, it was a lot nicer than I initially thought when I was there. Overall, I am excited to see how life is on another part of the island and I am sure as heck ready to go back :) I started my freshman year taking the most rigorous classes I could, while balancing that with the huge time commitment that is marching band. There was one other thing that kept my fall occupied, trying to find an exchange program so I could study Japanese in Japan. Now I did go to Japan, but if you know anything about me, I have no problem with getting out of America for the summer XD. Believe it or not, this is how I found NSLIY, some Google search online for a Japanese exchange program. Now if you know anything about NSLIY, they of course do not have a Japanese program. But they did have what I thought was, again, the next best thing, a Chinese program to spend the summer in China. Now after convincing my parents to let me apply back in September, I did more research about the program. I was stunned. I found Youtube vlogs from alums that made it look like a dream come true. I couldn't believe that I had been handed this opportunity on a virtual silver platter. I spent 2 weeks just hardcore hammering out my application, until finally, on October 13, 2017, I hit submit. I read from alum that there are 3 things that they are looking for in an application: passion, independence, and drive to use what you would learn from NSLIY later in life. I made sure to max all 3 of them out in my application. Quick Side Note: Prior to my NSLIY application, I had very little passion for China and Chinese. Throughout this arduous journey of essays and interviews and long waiting periods, I developed such a strong passion for the language I grew to love. NSLIY gave me the opportunity to find what I love even before I step on that plane. Even if I didn't get in, I knew I would be content with the fact that NSLIY had given me love for China, that I will never lose. Back to the application process. NSLIY's acceptance rate is about 16.5% for the unacquainted. It shakes out to be about 1/3 of the applicant pool are selected as semi-finalists (December 1), and 1/2 of the semi-finalists are offered finalist positions (Mid-March to April). Most apply 3 times, flat out rejected the first time, next time rejected after semifinalists, and finally usually accepted the third time. So almost all of NSLIY finalists are sophomores, juniors, and seniors. So come November 30th, I'm stressing out (first-year freshman applicant), just waiting for my rejection letter. That next day, I get the email. I got offered a semifinalist position as a freshman!! I was so ecstatic I was almost crying. When you become a semifinalist, you then have to schedule an interview. Now it gets serious. But then again, my odds just went from 1 in 6 to 1 in 2 :) The day of my interview came. Me, as always, showed up so early my interviewers weren't even there yet lol! I was the first interview of the morning. Since I was there so early, I got to help them set up, so I think that increased my chances a little. When it was time, I went downstairs and had my interview. I had heard conflicting accounts whether the interviewer has access to your application or not, and for me, it was not. I had to explain my story to her, as well as answer a few "what would you do" scenarios. They have a sheet that tells them what questions to ask, so my person just picked and chose which ones from the list to ask. My interviewer did tell me one thing that surprised me though. About midway through the interview she told "Just so you know, I care more about how you react as you answer my questions rather than what you respond." I think that is good advice that you don't hear a lot, so any future applicants, don't forget to show your passion! My interview was pretty smooth and very fast, but nothing extraordinary that would make me think "yea I have this in the bag". On my way out, I did meet my first alum, a girl who did the Oman program a couple of years back. It was fun to meet one in person instead of through YouTube! But yea, my interview wasn't anything special, but I guess in the end it was good enough :) The longest waiting period in the whole process is between the early January interviews and the March-April finalist results. NSLIY does their finalist results kind of differently though. Since there are 16 programs in total (8 languages, 1 summer and 1 AY for each), NSLIY does rolling decisions. But it is over a looong period of time. Anywhere from March 1-mid April your program could publish decisions. But if your program releases and you don't hear anything the first day, you're almost a definite no. This year Chinese had to wait a while, while most of the other summer programs released. I was checking Facebook and College Confidential constantly... First Hindi and Russian, then Persian, then Arabic, then finally, Chinese results came in at the most unexpected time. I was home sick from school that day, so I was in bed on my phone. Suddenly I got the email. I literally fell out of my bed LOL! I got in!!!! I rushed down to tell my parents. It went something like this:
My mom: How are you feeling? Me: I GOT INTO NSLIY!!!! My Mom: oKAY BUT HOW ARE YOU FEELING XD but more seriously, all of my hard work paid off. In my haste to tell my parents I didn't even read my program location. So I ran back upstairs and scrolled in the email... TAIWAN??? I was not expecting that! I thought that was only for the academic year kids! Turns out, we are the guinea pig year, the first summer program in Taiwan. Was I sad at first? A little. But I got over myself pretty quick. I was going to Taiwan for 7 weeks for free!! The rest is history :) or I guess 3 blog posts lol. But that's my whole story. How I got into Chinese, how I found NSLIY, my whole application process, everything. It's 4:30 am and I'm very dazed so sorry for the weird sentence structures XD. If you have any questions for me, please comment or email me at [email protected]! I love sharing my story and maybe someday it will help someone get in :) If that's you or even if you read this before or after applying, please let me know! I'd love to be a resource to help you if that's editing your essays or just answering a question. I am about to post my whole application, essays and all to my blog, so read that too. Good night guys :) |