Kirby TAYLOR

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
Exchange to Tianjin Normal University, China

My time in China was such a fantastic experience and one that I will never forget. I am so grateful to RMIT and Tianjin Normal University for allowing this exchange! How far we have come and how quickly time went!

I loved experiencing the culture, people and language of China and am very proud to say that by the end I could have a conversation with my Chinese friends as well as local shopkeepers, waitresses and taxi drivers! I remember travelling during my first couple of weeks in China and attempting to pronounce Chinese words from a little phrasebook and using lots of hand actions to communicate. One of my proudest moments was making my final speech at the closing ceremony in Chinese - I cannot credit my buddy Tina and my teachers enough for the assistance they gave me in developing my Chinese language skills!

I enjoyed travelling, living and studying in China so much and already want to go back! Before I left Australia I had studied some Chinese and also had volunteered at RMIT English Worldwide assisting mostly Chinese international students with their English skills so was very excited to visit there but didn’t quite know what to expect. I was actually quite apprehensive about how I would find the culture and the language as I knew it would be incredibly different to that of Australia.

I am very honoured and fortunate that I was able to live and study in China as it allowed me to see how lucky I am to be Australian and how easy we have it when it comes to getting opportunities to work and study in Australia and also travel overseas. Many of the friends I made in China were such wonderful people who I have strongly encouraged to visit Australia so I can reciprocate their generosity in sharing cultural and historical knowledge and language advice. I also hope to visit our Chinese friends who are in Melbourne at the moment to show them around and hope they will get the same amount or even more from their visit to Australia as I did.

Whilst I was in China I was lucky enough to be visited by family members. This was their first time out of Australia and it was such a bold move by them – coming from a small country town of just 3000 people, the large population of China and the general busyness of everyday life in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai in particular was a little daunting for them. I feel quite proud that I was able to share this with them and now hopefully they too can brag about how wonderful Chinese people and their culture are.

Because of this scholarship program I have grown as a person, especially as a student. I believe that this opportunity has enriched my university degree and career prospects not only through networking with people from China, but all over the world. It also allowed me to be challenged in a foreign country, learning a foreign language, dealing with people from a completely different culture and background and travelling quite independently. I am so excited to share my time with friends and family.

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