Reflections on a Semester Away: A Look into the Varied Experiences of Visiting Students

Beginning My Reflections  Boy, what a semester it has been. As is always the case with me, time felt so slow– too slow– in the beginning, but looking back at it from the end, it went by extremely quickly. My semester in Japan has been full of surprises (both good and occasionally not-so-good) and so with this post, I will

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Always Try Everything Once

After much consideration, the most useful lesson I learned this summer was to “always try everything once”. Obviously, there are boundaries to this saying– there are a handful of things I absolutely recommend never trying. But, in terms of cultural immersion through history, friends, and food, it’s hard to go wrong. I strongly believe that giving everything a try lets

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Reflecting on the Concept of “Home” while Studying in Different Countries

I think many of us can relate to wondering or being asked where we are from. I often go into a run-on sentence of self-instruction. It goes, “I was born in Korea but then adopted as a baby to the United States and so I grew up in New Jersey!”, and that tends to be the best-abbreviated version I can

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Photo Essay: Reflections on Singapore’s Green Spaces

Although Amherst offers few courses on urban studies, I’ve always been fascinated by our urban environment and topics such as the social life of cities and the intersection between sustainability and urbanization. Singapore has proved to be the perfect setting for me to explore these topics. My urban studies course at Yale-NUS is unique for its breadth and comparative focus,

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Interviewing a Singaporean Friend

Interviewee: Name: Bertrand Yan Hometown: Singapore Major: Environmental studies I interviewed my friend Bertrand, who lived in the same residential college as me during my time abroad at Yale-NUS. During the semester, we’ve had conversations regarding our different upbringings and how they have significantly shaped our identities and perspectives, so I felt that it would be very interesting to probe

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An Interview with the Chaolei People of Southern Thailand

Now, we enter the final course of the sustainable development studies curriculum: Oceans. On campus, we took one week to learn about fishing regulations, sea grass, and more. Then, we took two and a half weeks in Southern Thailand. We stayed at two fishing villages, one of them all Muslim, and went camping on beautiful islands close to Malaysia.   

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