On September 24th, MID and IMPA programs co-hosted a summer field trips sharing meeting. This was the first event of field trip courses opened for international students this semester. The purpose of this event is to summarize the key learnings from MID and IMPA field trips of 2014-2015 academic year, in particular, providing a platform for international students to share and exchange reflection. Associate Dean, Ms. MENG Bo hosted this event along with Party Secretary, Ms. XIE Jing, MID Program Academic Director, Professor YIN Chengzhi, and Deputy Director of Chinese Students Office, Ms. LIU Jingwen. More than 40 MID and IMPA students attended the meeting.
Ms. MENG Bo first introduced the overall field trip structures for MID and IMPA programs and the achievements of field trips of 2014-2015 academic year. After that, Ms. XIE Jin introduced the tradition of Tsinghua University’s social practice, and completion of Chinese students’ summer social practice. Both of them mentioned that despite there were differences of organization, structure and expectation for Chinese students and international students’ field trips, they hoped in the future, the two groups’ could be merged to be one team together to do the social practice.
During the event, MID 2014 student Gerome from France, shared his internship experience at EDF, a French energy company. He mainly talked about the projects he had completed, and the overall learning and reflection of the internship. MID 2014 students Bruno from Brazil and Minh from Vietnam, shared their field trip experience at Gansu together. The presentation was themed as “Our Journey to the West” and explained their trips in detail at Lanzhou and Wuwei. They learned how China’s local development followed the national “One Road and One Belt” strategy. That experience also strengthened their knowledge regarding Chinese development practice. IMPA 2015 student George from Zimbabwe and Harvey from Suriname both shared their field trips at Guangxi and Shanghai. IMPA students were surprised the accomplishments of China has made after reform and openness, which really improved people’s lives qualities. At the same time, they also realized that the negative effects of regional inequality in the country, using the cases to compare the situations to their home countries.
Field training is a critical component of the curriculum for international students. The purpose is to create more opportunities for students so that they can better understand the Chinese development practice. Currently, both MID and IMPA programs have designed unique field trainings according to students’ characteristics and interests.
