{"id":150,"date":"2007-01-21T23:47:15","date_gmt":"2007-01-22T03:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worksforfood.com\/read\/2007\/01\/21\/classes-starting-and-whats-wrong-with-lingnan\/"},"modified":"2009-10-18T00:00:13","modified_gmt":"2009-10-18T04:00:13","slug":"classes-starting-and-whats-wrong-with-lingnan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/2007\/01\/21\/classes-starting-and-whats-wrong-with-lingnan\/","title":{"rendered":"Classes starting, and what&#8217;s wrong with Lingnan?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The past week has been fairly uneventful.  I&#8217;ve met some of the new exchangers, who seem nice enough but also seem a few collective decades younger than last semester&#8217;s.  Most of this term break&#8217;s exchange travelers are back and in one piece.  <\/p>\n<p>After much schedule-juggling, I&#8217;ll be going in to this week with the following classes.  I won&#8217;t try to reproduce my schedule as Lingnan&#8217;s timetables don&#8217;t make the slightest bit of sense.<\/p>\n<p>HST 193 China Through Eyes of the West [what do I think?  this class should tell me!]<br \/>\nHST 399A History of Contemporary China<br \/>\nHST 399E The World Turned Upside Down [the American Revolution?  History of British colonial defeats?  Who knows.]<br \/>\nPOL 319 International Politics of Northeast Asia<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to go in with five or six classes, but the schedule isn&#8217;t cooperating.  I hope I&#8217;ll be able to stay in all four of those and avoid needing to scramble for an add\/drop during this upcoming week.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been telling people&#8212;and I guess I should put it out on this blog for any googlers to see&#8212;that I cannot recommend Lingnan as a study abroad experience.  To qualify that: being in Hong Kong is great, even if I&#8217;m a solid hour by train from the city center.  The Office of International Programs here is great.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;study&#8221; is&#8230; unimpressive.  The administration and its policies are obtuse.  There will be a &#8220;What&#8217;s Wrong with Lingnan&#8221; series coming up to elaborate and suggest changes, but since I&#8217;m not at the appropriate hierarchical level my complaints won&#8217;t do any good here.  The hostel atmosphere is stifling: the university treats its students as 15-year-olds and gets the appropriate behavior in response.<\/p>\n<p>The only real positive about Lingnan is that its small size may be easier to handle as an exchange student.  Otherwise, you can have a good exchange experience&#8212;on balance, I think my experience has been good so far&#8212;at Lingnan, but it&#8217;ll be in spite of rather than because of Lingnan.<\/p>\n<p>Harsh words, perhaps.  I know that the legitimate criticisms of WVU by international students in basic areas such as &#8220;getting students from airport to dorm room without major adventures&#8221; might be worse than any difficulties Lingnan&#8217;s thrown at me, but I think someone considering exchanging at Lingnan would be well-served by knowing about these problems before arriving.  I also think Lingnan would be well-served by listening to some of the exchange students&#8217; criticisms instead of summarily dismissing them.  We aren&#8217;t right about everything, but we can&#8217;t be wrong about everything either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The past week has been fairly uneventful. I&#8217;ve met some of the new exchangers, who seem nice enough but also seem a few collective decades younger than last semester&#8217;s. Most of this term break&#8217;s exchange travelers are back and in one piece. After much schedule-juggling, I&#8217;ll be going in to this week with the following [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hong-kong","tag-lingnan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danielharr.is\/read\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}