Select Page

Yin and Yang: China and the U.S.

Standing 475 meters above the ground on the glass floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center observatory, the sprawling lights of the earth’s largest city pierced through the haze of fog and pollution, skyscrapers and cruise ships alike both dazzling with light and...

Children and Youth Empowerment Center, Nyeri, Kenya Part 1

I have spent the past two weeks at the Children and Youth Empowerment center in Nyeri, Kenya. While there, my classmates and I held 5 business workshops in order to help encourage the youth there to think about their business ideas and how to put them into practice....

Jumbled Reflections from the Caen Memorial

I ended up spending the entirety of my day at the Caen Memorial, which is a museum mainly about the Second World War, although it does have a wing about the Cold War as well. The museum was one of the most powerful I have visited, right up there with both the...

From Hong Qing to Shanghai: The Two Worlds of China

Rice paddies stretch across the valley of Hong Qing, from the river right next to the town to the bottom of the surrounding mountains. Cultivated fields contrast with untamed forests on top of the hills that pepper the horizon. There are no sounds of cars or engines,...

Confronting Germany’s Past in Munich

  So far during my time in Europe I have gotten to see some pretty incredible sights in France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, and of course Germany. However, even though I am studying in Germany, most of my trips have...

A Whole New World

I have never faced a language barrier. Growing up in the United States, everyone spoke English. Even when my family traveled to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, the official language was one of my own. The only time I ever had difficulty understanding someone was...

Becoming Chinese

During my second week in China, the lifestyle here has started to become normal to me. I now reach for chopsticks without even looking for a fork, I pay no attention to street vendors and flashing lights, and I speak less, listen more, and bow at the end of a...

Working out the Kinks

As just about anybody who has spoken to me in the past two months knows, my first step in actually being able to test participants here in Nijmegen is recoding my study. While Penn State uses E-Prime for EEG experiments, Radboud uses Presentation, so I had no choice...

Spring Break 2.0

This past week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel across Europe for my spring break and my birthday. There are innumerable positive events which occurred — from visiting Pompeii to seeing the pope to eating lots and lots of gelato —...