CAP – ASTU

Wow the last ASTU post of the year already?! The school year went by so quickly that I’m sure I’ll get my undergraduate degree before I know it… yet I felt like I learned so much but not enough at the same time?

Honestly, I’m very happy with how everything went this year (except maybe my grades) and I think I had a pretty fun first year of university experience. I felt like the biggest challenge for me this year was to really be efficient with time management and learning how to avoid distractions aka socializing… But 2015/16 was good to me.

Something I learned in relations to ASTU was definitely how to read papers quickly and efficiently, because the research materials for almost all other subjects are in the forms of scholarly essays, and considering that in ASTU we learn the break down of how a scholarly essay is formatted, I find myself able to get what the author is trying to say in a precise and accurate way. This skill made my research process so much easier, and I’m sure I’ll be using it for years to come!

On another note, I also want to discuss what it means to me to be a global citizen. When I signed up for the CAP global citizens stream, it was because I really enjoyed geography in high school and I was curious about the other subjects that the stream had to offer as well. But I wasn’t sure how the program was to fulfill the role of a global citizen – I mean what did this term even mean right? And it was only a brief moment at the beginning of the school year that ‘global citizen’ was addressed (the definition) before it just became a routine of learning things. Classes became focused on topics relative to their subjects, and I wasn’t really sure I could see the ‘global’ connection between the classes and students who seemed so distinctly apart. But looking at the situation now, I was very much reminded of the VICE documentary (about a trash island in the middle of the ocean somewhere) in which the explorers were trying to find a physical trash island. In reality, the island didn’t exist, just as how I imagined the global connection between the classes and everyone in the program to be something that I could physically or at least consciously acknowledge – but rather something else was in its place. Each of the subjects in this stream covered something that the other subject couldn’t, and while that may be the nature of the subject (like math can’t teach you about history), I found myself to be exposed to a lot of new and different perspectives – which may be the global connection, or should I say lens, that I gained from this program. And furthermore, this global lens is always followed through with why and how things happen the way they do, and the consequences of everything.

So, after all this, I guess I could say that the biggest thing I learned was probably to be more aware of the unexpected, and to not fall into the trap of expecting something. And to always keep learning I guess?

Thanks everyone for reading my blog until the end and until next time,

Peijia Ding

PS. I always feel super guilty about my trash/waste now after that documentary, so keep recycling/saving the planet!!