Our last full day in Korea had unfortunately arrived so quickly. With the full day free, naturally we went back to the beautiful beach we first went to when we arrived in Busan. The weather was perfect for a beach day. Haeundae beach was about a thirty minute taxi ride from the hotel. There are…
Category: Plus3 2019
Final Takeaways
My trip to South Korea has been a great professional experience for me. I learned a lot about business during the site visits that I otherwise would not have experienced within the engineering school. This post is a reflection on some of the things that I took away from the trip that pertain to my…
Live Octopus? Yes, Please!
Thursday, our last day of official visits, finally came. Today’s agenda only consisted of the US Consulate in Busan and Pusan National University. The consulate felt more like a cultural visit; we learned about the history of Busan and its relation to the United States and also Japan. Many of us were curious about the…
Goodbye China
My time in China was enriching both personally and professionally. I learned a lot about China and business in China but I also got a better understanding of business and what I can do as a part of the industry. For one thing, I realized how important integrity is. From everything I saw with the…
5/16 Yu Garden
This is already our last morning in China! We drove the bus into Shanghai and got out to walk down a street that looked a lot like a mix of the Hutong district in Beijing and Muslim Street in Xi’an, the street even had some street vendors cranking out the usual octopus on a stick….
5/15 Yangshan Port
Today was our first company visit where we had to take a bus to see the different parts of the facility. Yangshan port is humongous, and we had to take one of the longest bridges I have ever been on to get there. Between endpoints, the bridge was a thirty minute drive and for a…
5/14 AmCham and Horiba
Today we visited the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) office in Shanghai, an organization that monitors and reports on business and trade between China and America. Despite how official the name sounds, the office isn’t actually related to other American Chamber of Commerce offices in different countries. I absolutely loved the presentation at AmCham. The…
Final Blog
Writing this last blog reminds me of all the wonderful experiences our Plus3 group had in China. I would like to share my highlights from each city. I was nervous to be in another country not knowing the native language, but Beijing changed my feelings quickly. Visiting the Great Wall of China was by far…
5/13 ECUST and Urban Planning Museum
Today we visited the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. When we got off the bus at the university I immediately noticed how different the university felt compared to the Central University of Finance and Economics, where we visited in Beijing, and the University of Pittsburgh. there was by far more greenery…
5/12 Terracotta Warriors
When we left the hotel in the morning the sky was clear and I was eager to see the Terracotta warriors I had been hearing about since elementary school. When we arrived we walked through the museum portion that explained the history of the warriors and their excavation process. I did not know that the…
5/11 Children’s Village and Pagoda
We started our first full day in Xian with a visit to the Children’s Village, an organization that shelters and takes care of children while their parents are in jail. Since the village was opened in 1996, it has helped over 2,000 children return to their families who would have been homeless otherwise. After a…
5/9 Forbidden City
I thought we did a lot on the day we visited the Great Wall, but today we bounced around what felt like all of Beijing visiting cultural sites. We started our day at Tienanmen Square, and it was an interesting time to be there. The day we visited was about one month before the thirty…
Yu Garden and Presentations
Today, we visited the Yu Garden and learned many interesting facts about the history of it from our tour guide. The garden was made by a Ming Dynasty government officer, named Pan Yunduan. He made it for his parents and named it the Yu garden because “Yu” means peace and satisfaction. There were many ponds,…
5/8 Huawei and VIP Kid
Today we visited the first companies on the trip, starting with Huawei, a major telecom firm, and VIP Kid, an online education startup that connects kids in China with English teachers in America. Before we even left the bus, Huawei set the bar for our future company visits extremely high. Beijing is an arid region…
5/7 CUFE Visit
Today we visited the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing. The campus was beautiful, it held much more green space than any other university Iʼve seen. We started the visit off with a short lecture from a professor about big data and data analytics. We learned about the many ways data is collected…
Blog #11: A Reflection
My time in China was a once in a lifetime experience that I would never be able to recreate if I wanted to recreate it. We were all told that the two weeks we were going to spend in China weren’t supposed to be a vacation. Going in I took those words to heart. I…
Blog #10: Judgement Day
Today, unfortunately, was going to be our last day in China. That was such a bittersweet thing to think about while eating breakfast because I had so much fun in China, and I’ve made a lot of new friends that I would have to say goodbye to for the summer, and I learned so much;…
Blog #9: I am Dead
Today was Day 11, and that means it’s almost time for us to go home which is pretty bittersweet to think about. Today we were going to be visiting Yang Shan Port which handles a very large amount of China’s sea shipping. I had a rough night the night before, so I slept basically the…
Blog #8: Best Day Ever
Day 10 was going to be our second full day in Shanghai, and it was a packed one because we had two company visits planned. The first visit was the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and the second was going to be Horiba which is an engineering and research and development firm. After the typical…
Blog #7: Getting Frisky at the Acrobatics Show
Day 8 was our travel day to Shanghai. We traveled by bullet train and it took us about 5 hours to get there. We arrived around 2 or 3, I can’t really remember. After getting there, we settled into our hotel. This was by far the best hotel of the trip and arguably one of…