Exchange Diary (CityU Students)

Monday, 8th December 2008

Today is the first day of the final examination week. I had two exams today: mathematics and political science.

I like these two courses very much. Through mathematics, I practice how to use the powerful software MATLAB. It is really great software which helps us improve efficiency and accuracy. My major is financial engineering, so mathematics is of great importance to me. I will continue to learn mathematics in next term. I expect it to be fun.

I learned some major countries’ history and political systems in Comparative Politics. I feel fruitful that I learn a lot of English vocabularies about politics which improved my understandability for reading the English news.. During the class, we discussed freely about political issues like the 2008 U.S. president election.

After the exam, I went out to have a look at the nature and rest.


Tuesday, 9th December 2008

Today, I had two exams today: Business Law and Managing individuals & team performance.

The professor who taught business law spoke very fast that I couldn’t catch up his speed at the very beginning of the fall term. As the time passed, I got used to the class and I could understand most of his English. Law is very interesting stuff. In the USA, everyone can sue anyone for any reason and there are plenty of famous lawsuits which help us understanding the law.

Managing individuals & team performance is a time consuming course and requires lots of interactions with the other students. We had an assignment called International Resource Guide (IRG) which required us to form a team of five people from different cultural background and decide a country other than the USA to do research and write a report and do a presentation. My team members were all very nice and we selected China as our IRG country. I think we’ve done a good job. I also meet a girl from Taiwan through this course. She owns a car here and takes me shopping in the other city.



Wednesday, 10th December 2008

Today, one girl from the English Language Intensive Program of OSU needed to move out of our lodge because she will go to Pennsylvania for the winter term. We went outside to take photos together. It usually rains at this time of the year in Corvallis. But the weather was nice today. I coould see blue sky clearly. The leaves all turned yellow and fell as the wind blew. Oregon is famous for its forest. A lot of timber is produced here and exported to other state or other countries. Air is clean here. I sometimes see wild animals like deer and squirrels which I haven’t seen before.





Thursday, 11th December 2008

Today my friend and I went to the research center of Hewlett-Packard which is located in Corvallis. When we got off the bus, I saw a beautiful lake with ducks swimming on it. As we were approaching the lake, nearly all the ducks went quickly towards us. Maybe they thought we had food to feed them but they were so disappointed because we only took photos of them. To my surprise, those ducks could fly!





Friday, 12th December 2008

It started to rain today and I heard that there would be snowy the day after tomorrow. I was born and grew up in Southern China and had never seen snow before. I was excited about that.

Tonight I ate a great meal. The nutrition must be balanced. I had vegetable, noodle, mushroom and so on. I hoped I would be fatter because I thought myself was too thin. It was very fantastic to cook the food and I wished I could learn very excellent cooking skills!

Labels: 2008/2009 Semester A