Meet & Greet

Weather: 48F
Time: Mid-night

Tonight there was a meet and greet type of event.  Another member sent out an email this morning talking about meeting up with some chinese students to grab dinner.  There is a restaurant on campus that is called Times Cafe, they serve pretty decent pizza for the price.  It costs 20RMB to get a 9inch pizza.  The popular choices are "Smoked Chicken" "All Meat" and "Hawaii."

From J Biber

Meet & Greet
Walking in to the cafe I had been to many times already, a group of about nine Americans joined a party room full of chinese students.  It was probably 30 chinese students total.  I did not really know what was going on until I got there, but the students are in the same materials class as the purdue kids.  I did not know anyone in the room since I am not in that class.  I was excited to hear how good their English was for the most part, complete sentences.  It was very fun to get to meet all of these students.

After talking to the cstudents for a bit I found out that all of them are also mechanical engineers.  They pay more than double the regular students at the university to be in courses taught in english.  There were many interesting conversations I was involved in for the evening.  All of the cstudents wanted to talk to an American.  In fact, my night was so busy talking to people I was never able to get to the table to make my own pizza.  I really was looking forward to making my own pizza, but I did get to meet a lot of new friends.  It was a unique experience from the rest of China adventure so far because all the cstudents really wanted to talk to an American.  There was a point where a student went and grabbed four Coca-Cola's and offered it to me and the other guy I was standing with before offering it to the chinese girls standing right there.  I offered it to the ladies first, then took a drink after it was forced on me by the young man.

The topics of the night ranged greatly.  There was one conversation where I learned about the foreign exchange programs.  Another conversation was based around how much money is spent to go to school in China vs USA and year over year spending to live and go to school.  There was also discussions about Google and the censorship debate, which bloomed into a further discussion on government control of the media.  A less serious topic of "Where do you see yourself in 20 years?"

Shanghai Jiao Tong  University has an exchange program that started with the University of Michigan and has expanded to include Purdue University.  Originally, U of M professors would come over to China and teach engineering courses in English.  Now there are programs to start two years at SJTU and then finish at Purdue / U of M.  Some of the cstudents at the event are actually going to be transferring to Purdue this fall.  It was really good to make that connection!  We talked about how there are large differences between the lifestyles and discussed some of their concerns.  One student was concerned about guns, because he is always reading about shootings in America and he assumed that everyone is carrying a gun.  I told him that it was nothing to be worried about and assured him he would be safe.  He then challenged me with the question, "Do you think the guns create violence?"  I told him he has nothing to worry about when he gets to Purdue.

There was also quite a bit of concern about pricing.  They wanted to know how much it costs to live at Purdue and I told them is much more expensive.  I detailed that a meal in the dining hall costs 56RMB at Purdue and that they can save money by going to the grocery store.  It lead up to the question, "How much do you spend in a year?"  We roughly approximated for living, tuition, food, and entertainment it can cost up to 25,000USD.  When we added the costs of their living in Shanghai, their summation came up to 21,000RMB.  The current conversion rate is 6.853 RMB for 1USD.  Their tuition is about 5000RMB and for some students it is subsidized by the government.  We briefly discussed scholarships and how being a minority can land you more money in the USA.  When I told them that minorities can get more money for ethnicity, religion, or sex they said, "How is that fair?"  I told them it is privately funded and so there are special interest groups for giving money.

The short of the censorship conversation came down to stating a few points.  America has a different type of censorship - bias media.  Anyone who takes all their news from one source, be it the government or a single news station, does not get to see the whole picture.  In terms of the internet the cstudents said that Google was acting inappropriately and was just trying to draw attention to get a large search base and more name recognition.  There was also discussion about freedom of speech on the internet in China and allowing the people to criticize the government and how this can cause trouble.  The cstudent I was talking to pointed out that some people are not capable of handling the extreme emotions on the internet and this causes trouble because some people act on these single minded opinions.  It was an interesting point.

Most fun, the cstudents had slightly different goals than some of the Americans in the group.  The six students we were talking to four of them were wanting a life in China after getting a masters of ME in the US.  Two of the students wanted to live abroad and go to Europe and the USA for a long time.  Most of them aspired to be content and providing for their family.  A few of them wanted to return to China to serve the country with their engineering knowledge.  Some of them truly desire to be design engineers and some of them have a path of business as part of their extended education.

All in all, it was a very interesting evening getting to meet these students for the first time and having serious conversations with them.  I am happy to have had this experience and I am looking forward to seeing some of these students again.

Delivery McDonald's
The conversations were so involved I did not get anything to eat for dinner except one can of Coke and a few french fries.  This drove to me to order McDonald's for the first time over the phone.  It took 30 minutes.  I called into the central order hotline.  They took my order in English and asked for my address and phone number.  They then put the order into the nearest McDonald's location and had a man bring be a double cheese burger value meal + some chicken nuggets for 36RMB.  7RMB was the delivery fee and they bought it to my door.  And of course, since it is China there is no tipping.

Email is Fast
I asked my roommate to send me an email while I was writing this blog post.  He sent me the picture above.  I was impressed that the email took less than five seconds to go from his laptop in China to the Purdue campus and then ended in my inbox.  I like to think that five seconds is very quick considering that information traveled roughly 20,000 miles, but I laughed at myself for this thought.  I am looking forward to the future.  Some day, my children will read a hard copy of this blog and they will get a chuckle out of so much that I have written, and that is okay.

Biber