Last year, I stayed in CLIK (Chinese Language Institute of Keimyung University) House, which is a specialized scholarship dormitory in Myunggyo Residential Complex, to study Chinese every morning and every evening. When I lived there, I had many opportunities to hear about international programs in China. One day, an assistant of CLIK House announced the Confucius Institute Scholarship to BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture University) for a semester. The Confucius Institutes are non-profit educational organizations, devoted to satisfying the Chinese language education needs of people from different countries and regions in the world. I hesitated a little about applying or not because my major is not connected with China and Chinese, but I thought it would be a really good opportunity to learn a new world. So, I applied for this scholarship and passed the interviews, and I got the chance to go to Beijing.

BLCU is located in the northern part of Beijing, a kind of university area near Peking University and Tsinghua University, which are the best universities in China. It’s a really good environment not only to study Chinese, but also to make lots of friends from different countries. I had 4 hours of Chinese class from 8am to 12pm, so after class I usually traveled around Beijing or reviewed the chapters that I had learned. Beijing itself is really big so it never gets boring. Even if I went to the same place several times, I could see the difference day by day because Beijing is developing every day.

As I mentioned before, in BLCU, I got lots of chances to hang out with people from lots of different countries. I felt like I was living in a small global village which has an official language, Chinese. For example, my classmates consisted of 9 different countries and the students in my dormitory building were from 30 different countries. While hanging out with them, even though I was in China, I realized that English is the most important tool in this globalized world, and we should care about global awareness. Most students except Korean and Japanese could speak almost fluent English, even though they had never studied abroad, and most of the students consider the world really small and they prepare to be active in the international arena. Because we live in this boundless global village, these things are the most basic things that we should have.

My first studying abroad experience was amazing. Even though I had learned Chinese for 5 years, I think I didn’t know much about China before I was there. Except for people who are interested in China or people learning Chinese, people often don’t know how big and developed China is. We should break our stereotypes about old China. Even now, every second, it changes.