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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…