CET Harbin

Finally something hopefully useful for anyone reading this who is considering applying to CET Harbin at any point in the future. I've been in Harbin for almost a week now, so I figured I'd briefly summarize what the program has been like so far. I apologize to anyone reading this with no intention of ever applying to CET (though it might be interesting anyway).

In general, it's been a pretty good opening week, though there have certainly been ups and downs. First, the good parts. Unlike many of the Light Fellowship programs, CET students share a dorm room with a Chinese student (from Harbin Institute of Technology - 哈工大). While essentially having a hotel room all to myself at HBA last summer was great, the Chinese roommates have been an amazing addition to the program so far. My Chinese has improved a lot simply from talking to my roommate at night while the two of us do homework (he's preparing for finals unfortunately). All 24 of the Chinese roommates are genuinely interested in getting to know us, and many of us (both CET students and HIT students) hang out together almost every day. Whether it's going out to dinner, playing basketball, or watching the World Cup at night, it's been a ton of fun and a great way to both improve our Chinese and just learn about college life in China.

HIT's campus is great too. For those of you who like to play sports, our dorm is literally 20 feet away from close to 20 basketball courts, 6 tennis courts, four volleyball courts, and a soccer field. The basketball courts are absolutely packed at all hours of the day, so you can play pickup whenever you want. There's a huge supermarket on campus that has nearly anything you will need for the summer. And there are a bunch of cafeterias on campus that are unbelievably cheap (you could easily get by on $1 a day for three fairly big meals). If you're willing to spend a little more (not much more because most things are cheap here - cheaper than Beijing), there are also some very good restaurants near campus.

So far the academic side of CET has been mixed for me. One positive aspect of CET's program is that you get to take a wide variety of classes. I'm taking a newspaper reading class (5 people), a business Chinese class (4 people), a pronunciation class (2 people), and doing a 1 on 1 summer long project. Getting through a week at HBA was always a huge struggle because it was nonstop drill-memorize, drill-memorize. While the workload here has been pretty tough so far, it is certainly more mixed.

Unfortunately, I wish the classes forced us to be a little more creative. Most of the classes so far have been tons of read or listening and repeating. That strategy has its advantages, but I really thought HBA did a good job of forcing us to try to come up with our own sentences and express our own thoughts. HBA's 1 on 1 class was purely conversational, and I don't feel like there is a similar opportunity here to simply practice freely speaking Chinese (perhaps that's what the roommates are for).

Nevertheless, it's too early to be critical. The Chinese levels of the students here are incredibly diverse, so the first week has included a lot of adjusting and figuring out how to go forward. Maybe I just need to get used to a slightly different style of teaching.

All in all, I would definitely recommend CET so far. Even if HBA's classes were stronger (which is still debatable at this point), there are many other aspects of CET that I'm looking forward to for the next 7 weeks.

That's it for now. Off to watching the World Cup (in Chinese - good listening practice) with two HIT students and my friend Dominic while doing homework.

Louis