My name is Rochelle, Rochelle Liu and I'm a senior at the University of Iowa. I graduate in May 2011.
I'm majoring in English and minoring in Chinese. I studied in Beijing, China
during summer and fall 2009.
And I guess I went abroad because I was a Chinese major at the time,
and so I was trying to
get ahead
on my Chinese classes. In a way to get rid of a year and a half of Chinese
within the six months, which I did. And guess another reason I wanted to go to China
to kind of get a feel of my Chinese roots.
I was born in America so it was
something I really, really wanted to try-try to understand in a way
my best experience wasn't necessarily
my program while I was studying abroad
um, it was that month between the summer semester and the fall semester.
I got to meet my extended family, and they live in a very, very like rural areas of
China.
I got to see how people in the countryside lived, how they conserved water,
how they kind of just passed their time.
I also got to zipline off of the Great Wall. I didn't know we could do that, and so when we were
presented the opportunity
that was the first thing
that my friend and I did
when we visited a section of the Great Wall.
My advice to students studying abroad is to be open-minded,
because if you go in thinking that it's going to be exactly like America or like
it's going to be exactly like it is on the TV shows
or in fiction books, it's not
you're going to be disappointed or it's going to be very hard to adjust.
Being open-minded and being
open to the idea that people are different and it's okay for them to be
different
makes the study abraod experience so much more fun and rewarding in the end.