As some of you may know already, I’m majoring in Chinese Language and minoring in Japanese. I’ve always had a strong passion for languages, and I’m super good at them (especially Japanese). The main reason I picked Chinese (Mandarin) as my major, is because it’s the most spoken language in the world, and it’s necessary for my career choice (I’d like to work for the National Security Agency). Another reason I picked Chinese is because I want to work for the Peace Corps in China when I graduate college.
Mainland China has extremely impoverished areas. Due to the one child law, which is still active, many Chinese children are left in dumpsters, and on the streets on a daily basis for being disabled, deformed, or mentally challenged. Also, many perfectly healthy little girls are left unattended because the Chinese generally want a male to carry on and bring honor to their family name. These children either die or are brought to orphanages. Orphanages all over China are completely full and barely have enough supplies to take care of the children there, let alone have enough money for medical care.
My goal when I join the Peace Corps is to go to mainland China, work in orphanages, and help Chinese children. Doing this through the Peace Corps is a large commitment, because you are required to be there for 2 years and 3 months. The benefits to being a part of the Peace Corps are while you’re overseas, they pay your student loans (yay), you receive more language training, a pay of $7,425 for completing your service, full medical and dental coverage, 48 paid vacation days, paid living expenses, and advantages in federal employment (which is awesome since I want to work for the NSA, as I mentioned before).
I’m extremely excited to join the Peace Corps and I hope you all at least look into it. It can be an amazing opportunity, depending on where you go and what you do. You can impact so many lives and give people a wonderful gift. Hope.
That’s really neat! I really like languages as well, but I’m extremely intimidated by Chinese and Japanese , at least in part because of the totally different form of writing. I’m working on German right now and once I get good at that (I’m thinking of minoring or majoring in it) I hope to learn Spanish and/or French and/or Arabic. I like your reasons for learning Chinese and Japanese, they kind of make me want to learn those too, but they’re so intimidating!!! Anyway, it’s also neat that you want to join the Peace Corps, I’m actually hoping to do the same thing, although if I get sent to China I guess I’ll get a crash course in the language anyway.
This is so cool! Working for the Peace Corps is such an honorable goal. And working for the NSA just sounds pretty awesome. I also like your reasons for choosing mainland China. I feel that sometimes, people don’t see the problems and poverty in China because we perceive China to be this huge country that makes everything found in Target. It’s true that China is pretty advanced in a lot of ways, but poverty is still a huge problem. Best of luck to you in your work with the Peace Corps!
That’s awesome. It’s cool how you have a passion for languages. I, on the other hand, absolutley hate learning languages. I had a requirement of 6 years of language in my highschool which might factor into my hate of languages. I am even considereing changing my major just so I don’t have to take a language which is pretty pathetic, I’ll admit it.I didn’t know the Peace Corps had that many benefits either, thats good to know.