Final Blog

Sorry for the late post. I’m back to China now for the summer vacation and have limited access to blogger.com
This is my final blog for this year, I will no longer write blogs and there will be a new Graduate Assistant continues to introduce his/her life here at PennGSE.
Thanks for all of your support of my blog and I really appreciate that. Wish you all a good luck in application!

Why PennGSE?

I have been thinking about writing a blog on why I chose Penn GSE, then I realized I haven't really thought about this question before I accepted. So the better topic is why I like Penn GSE after I came here since I only started thinking about this after I came to Penn GSE.
The thing I like most about GSE is the accessibility of professors and advisors. I care about if the professors are approachable a lot since it's graduate school, unlike the high school or undergraduate, the communication and interaction with professors can enlighten my studies to a great extent. Luckily, the professors in my program are very friendly and approachable, so are my advisor, she's very helpful in my studies and career development. She introduced me many internship opportunities and have helped me with my course selection.

Besides, I really enjoyed the classes here at Penn GSE. Till now, the class that I enjoyed the most is the language and gender class this semester. I feel that I have learned a lot from the class not only in the aspect of research study but also to my personal reflection as a female. I have also improved my English writing skills a lot in this class. I'm really looking forward to the distribution class (which is the class outside my division but within GSE), i chose the data analysis class from Quantitative Methods division and I think it will be a great experience too.
I also enjoyed my program's freedom to focus our study on the topics that we are interested in, we can choose distribution course which i have explained before, we can also choose courses outside GSE so we can have a more comprehensive understanding of the field.
In sum, I really think Penn GSE is a great choice for people who are open minded and curious of researching in various fields!

GAPSA Annual Moonlight Spirit Boat Cruise Celebration!

 

On April 27th, GAPSA has organized an annual party on the cruise. It was a 2 hour on-the-water, 1hour at-the-dockside trip departing from Penn's Landing. It is one of Penn's biggest events for grad students with open bar, food, music, and dancing on the Spirit of Philadelphia cruise ship.

The cruise was pretty cool, there is a dancing area with lights and really good music on the first floor, and open bar and deck to see the night views of Philly on the second floor. The only thing that's not good that day was the weather:( It was pretty cold and windy on 27th and if the weather could be more comforting the party would be really awesome because we could spend more time on the deck.

I went there with my friends and the other two GAs of GSE Admission Office, Kerry and Lisa were there too! It was really exciting to meet them!

How to take a driver's test in Philly for international students

Even though I failed today's driver's test, i thought it might be good to write a procedure about taking a driver's test in Philly if you are an international students, hope this would provide you some information!
-Do I have to get a driver's license?
If you have driving license in China (or many other countries), you can use it to drive, rent a car in United States. So you can choose not to take driver's test without causing any inconvenience. However, there're still many international students who already have the driver's test in their home country choose to take the test because driver's license is like ID in United States, you can use your driver's license at bar, airport so you don't have to carry passport with you all the time.
-How to take the test?
http://www.dot.state.pa.us/
This is the website where you will find many important information.
In order to get a license, you have to take the test for permit (knowledge test). You can find all the questions on the website, the real test will choose 18 questions out of the pool randomly and you have to answer 16 correctly to pass
Once you get the permit, you can driver with a driving license holder beside you. And as long as you practice enough and feel confident about the road test, you can schedule a test online, which is very convenient.
For road test, you have to go there accompanied by a holder of driving license. You can choose to rent a car on site, which is 50 dollars, or you can use your own car (but the car must have insurance and registration certificate).
The test is quite easy but you have to really pay attention to details, especially those regarding safety issues (which i didn't really pay attention to so i failed -_-) Once you pass the test, you can get a temporary license and the formal one will be sent to your home in 2 weeks.

Crazy Spring Fling!

Spring Fling is an annual festival for the students at the end of each Spring semester, usually beginning on the Friday of the second to last week of the semester and continuing until Saturday night. Fling, which began in 1973, is dubbed the largest college party on the East Coast, and is hosted by the university's Social Planning and Events Committee.[8] The event takes place on College Green, Wynn Commons, and The Quadrangle (or Quad) for a student body drenched in alcohol, for the most part. Over the past few years there has been legitimate discussion towards potentially moving the event out of the Quad, but improved behavior has resulted in the carnival aspect of the festival remaining in the Quad. College Green becomes a staging area for carnival games and carnival food. Two stages in the Quad host Penn's performing arts groups. Saturday night, Penn holds a festival on College Green, and Friday night SPEC (The Social Planning and Events Committee [7]) brings in a headlining musical act for a concert. Past guests for this concert have included Wyclef Jean, Busta Rhymes, Sonic Youth, and Of A Revolution.[9] The 2007 concert featured Ben Folds and Third Eye Blind. The 2008 concert was moved to Franklin Field since it featured a triple-bill of Ludacris, Gym Class Heroes, and OK Go.[10] Learning from the 2008 concert, 2009's concert featuring Guster and Akon ran much more smoothly.[11] The 2010 line up was Kid Cudi, Shwayze and Snoop Dogg. The 2011 Fling performers were Ratatat, Flo-Rida, and Lupe Fiasco. The 2012 Fling performers are Tiesto and Passion Pit. （From Wikipedia)

 

I went to this year's concert and It is quite exciting and crazy, DJ Tiesto is said to be the top 3 DJ in US.

Something I did in this week

I can't really think of any important theme to write about so I will just write something about this week since I seem to have a very busy week.
On Wednesday's Marketing Strategy class, we have a guest speaker: Ravi Chaturvedi, the former president of P&G North-East Asia. Ravi is very experienced in marketer and he has shared with us his personal experience in Japan to help P&G compete with KAO as a late entrant.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I have interviewed two company executives in US because of a project that I am working as an intern right now. The interviewees are professional managers and an in-depth interview with them are very thought provoking. One of them have shared all he valued integrity in his company and he defines integrity as "doing the right thing when nobody watches".
On Wednesday night, I watched the Hunger Games. It's a great movie but I felt like the storyline is a little bit cliche even though the settings are quite creative. I enjoyed the movie and really looking forward to watching the next series.
On Thursday's strategic brand management class, we have a guest speaker from reputation.com, he has introduced us the business that reputation.com is doing right now and how to build a strong personal brand through online media.
On Thursday's Language and gender class, we have discussed about the language socialization and its effects on gender. One of the readings have mentioned how teenage gays are socialized through language, which brought me a lot to think about gender construction since the last class's media analysis (Please refer to the last post)
On Thursday night, GAPSA has a great event "Wine Walk" for all the graduate students in the school, it's an awesome event and people get to taste wines and get connected at different schools.
On Friday, I watched the 3D version of Titanic. I can't use words to describe how much I love this movie. I was only a primary school student when the last time I watched it, I barely understood all the lines and scenes. But this time I watched it again with a deeper understanding and I was really moved by it. I think it's not only a movie about love & romance, it's also about the value of life.
On Saturday, I went to Farimount Park to picnic with several friends. We bought food at Chinatown and drove to the park. We ate and read and rested on the grassland, under the great sunshine. It was a wonderful day, I got relaxed and energized.

Well, that's what I did for this week, it's pretty crazy huh? ^^

Media Analysis for Language and Gender class

In this week's Language and Gender class, we were doing media analysis by groups. Our task is to identify language and gender issue in different channels of media. Each of the group has made a poster around the topic. The class was so much fun and I felt it's worth sharing what we did with all of you.

Our group did an analysis on the popular TV series How I Met Your Mother. The show was very hilarious and there are many elements that are very interesting. For example, there are a lot of humor in this show about "sex" and "non-conventional gender behavior". For example, Ted Mosby, who is a male character in the show, is however very "feminine" in his behavior and thoughts about relationship and life. In contrast, Robin Scherbatsky, who is the female character in the show, and was brought up by her dad as a boy because her dad prefers son to daughter. That's why she has a very "masculine" personality, for example she likes shooting gun, hockey, and cigar. The contradictory between Ted and Robin makes the show very funny, and it is contradictory to what we conventionally think about genders. However, is this anti-convention really create new gender categories or essentializing the binary gender system? That's a question that we need to think about the media today.

Another group did an analysis on the Disney Princess series, which has all these "princess" figures together. They have done a survey about how people think about these princess and what characteristics should a princess/female role model should have.

This group has focused on an ad campaign of Special K's "What do you gain when you lose?" There are a lot of creative gender issue going on and throughout the time there are certain dimension of gender that has changed and has not changed. It's very interesting to see this campaign as a breakthrough but somehow the underlying ideology about gender is still binary.

These are done by a group of Chinese students. They compared how big international brands translate their names into Chinese and how the choice of the characters  affect the gender ideology. There are several interesting examples like Maybelline, in Chinese it's 美宝莲, where 美 means beautiful, specifically to describe women, 宝 means precious and 莲 means lotus, which is an indication of purity in Chinese and it's usually related to girls.

The last group did an analysis around a movie Gran Torino, where a very typical male image is constructed. There are many interesting discourse in the movie that has conveyed gender ideology in it.

The media analysis was really thought-provoking because we really went deep into those topics in the modern media today and there can be so many controversial things about language and gender going on.