18 YOUTH | Campus Wednesday, August 16, 2017 CHINA DAILY
By YANG JUN in [email protected]
After more than three yearsat Guizhou Minzu University, Luong Nguyen Hai Nam, a Vietnamese student, has fallen in love with the land, the sour fish soup and the local culture.
“Guizhou is my secondhometown. I hope to spend my life here after finishing mystudies,” says Luong, 21.
He got a letter of admissionfrom the university in 2013, giving him a firstclass scholarship with a waiver of tuitionfees, free accommodation anda 1,000 yuan ($150) monthly stipend.
Studying abroad is a challenge for a high school graduate, especially considering thelanguage barrier and cultural differences. But he felt enthusiastic when he got to Guiyang, the provincial capital.
“My teachers were at theairport to pick us,” says Luong, who can now speak Chinese fluently.
Luong, who is majoring inhuman resources management, says he hopes he can get a good job in Guizhou after graduation, with his proficiency in Chinese.
Xia Jingang, the deputydean of the school of international education at Guizhou Minzu University, says the
school works hard to help international students to adapt and study.
There are currently morethan 200 students from ASEAN countries — including Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar — studying at the university.
Hoawg Xuan Truong, also
from Vietnam and a junior student at the university, says the ASEAN students and their Chinese classmates and teachers often gather and cook meals during weekends.
“This lets us taste otherAsian dishes on campus and share our thoughts, as well as make friends from different countries,” says the 28yearold.
Hoawg says the gatheringshave enhanced their understanding of different cultures.
According to Xia, activitiesare also held during local festivals to make them feel at home.
Luong says he has visitedmost cities in Guizhou in his spare time and communicated with the local people, and this has taught him a lot about Chinese culture.
He says he wants to be abridge between China and hiscountry.
“I will tell people aboutwhat I saw and heard and I hope to enhance mutual understanding.”
Xia, for his part, says: “Wewill organize cultural activities twice a year in which these students can mingle with Chinese people.”
Dong Xianwu contributed to the story.
US high schools’ intake of foreign students slows
NEW YORK — The numberof international students going to the United States for high school is leveling off after years of rapid growth, according to a new study.
Researchers at the nonprofit Institute of International Education in Washington say growth is slowing as students have more education opportunities in their home countries and abroad. But the US remains a top study destination for international students, researchers say.
“The numbers have beengrowing at slower rates eachyear, but there’s still definitely interest and growth ininternational students coming to earn a high schooldiploma in the US,” saysChristine Farrugia, author ofthe new study.
American high schoolsenrolled nearly 82,000 international students last year, thestudy found, more than triple the number from 2004. From 2012 to 2013 alone, the number increased 8 percent, but bylast year, the annual growth rate had fallen to just 1 percent.
Much of the shift has beendriven by students from China, who accounted for 42 percent of all international students at US high schools last year. Although their numbers surged in 2013 and 2014, researchers found, the growth began to taper off in 2016.
It reflects a similar slowdown of Chinese students going to US colleges and universities, which some experts blame on China’s cooled economy and increasing competition from schools in Australia and other nations.
High schools in the US arealso drawing large numbers of students from South Korea, Germany, Vietnam, Spain and Mexico.
Among students who go to
the US for high school, more are staying to earn a diploma rather than for shortterm exchange programs, the study found.
Farrugia says the shiftreflects a growing number of students seeking to gain an edge when applying to US colleges.
“They’re coming to get thatexperience, to get that admissions advantage,” she says.
California has been the topdestination for international high school students, with 12,200 last year, followed by New York, Texas, Florida and Massachusetts.
Foreign students make uponly half a percent of the morethan 15 million high school students in the US, and they are required to cover their own costs. The vast majority ofthem attend private schools, and more than half attend schools with a religious affiliation.
While growth among international students has slowed, the number of schools hosting them has continued to surge.
The study found that 2,800high schools enrolled international students last year, an increase of 26 percent since 2013.
At the same time, US colleges are increasingly building ties with those schools aspart of their work to recruitinternational students tocampus, says Rajika Bhandari, head of research at theInstitute of InternationalEducation.
“There’s a realization thatrecruiting future international students to collegesand universities in the US isnot just going to be aboutgoing overseas,” Bhandarisays.
“A lot of them are actuallyright here in our backyard.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Visitors at a US exhibition booth at an international education expo in Beijing in March. A QING / FOR CHINA DAILY
Antisocial kids more likely to end up poor, new study says
CHICAGO — People whoare aggressive, hyperactive and struggle in school with “antisocial behavior” are more likely to end up in persistent poverty, require welfare assistance, experience chronic unemployment and suffer premature death, a report says.
The research, conducted bythe University of Michigan, finds that this kind of persistence in antisocial behavior proves to be a strong independent indicator, along with reduced cognitive skills, for individuals to become permanently unable to participate in the workforce by age 50.
Research on socioeconomicattainment traditionally focuses on cognitive ability and educational performance as key individual factors. But researchers have recently begun to understand that suchnoncognitive factors as mental health, behavioral problems and personality traits play an important role in academic achievement, employment and related outcomes.
Jukka Savolainen of theUM Institute for SocialResearch used data from theJyvaskyla Longitudinal Study
of Personality and SocialDevelopment, which followed369 individuals from a city incentral Finland from ages 8 to50 and beyond.
The region is ethnically andsocioeconomically homogeneous, and provides a valuable backdrop against which social scientists can study how personality traits influence people’s lives.
At age 8, the study collectedteacher and classmate assessments of the children’s antisocial propensity: Whether they were aggressive and unable to regulate their behavior, as wellas teacherassessed school performance, and control variables such as gender and family socioeconomic status.
At 14, the study gatheredteacher reports about problembehavior and school data about academic performance.
In early adulthood, thestudy measured the participants’ socioeconomic status and deviant behavior such as criminal behavior, heavy drinking and alcoholism based on a selfreported questionnaire and government administrative records. In midlife, at 50, socioeconomic
status was measured using information from governmenttax, health and population records.
“There’s a strong antisocialpathway which starts from having a type of lack of control, which later on manifests in persistence in delinquency andrule breaking,” Savolainen says.
“While others grow up andmature, some people remain leading the fast life, drinking, fighting and divorcing at an earlier rate.”
The researchers didn’t finda direct line of cause between childhood antisocial propensities to socioeconomic exclusion, but the antisocial tendencies set in a motion a cumulative pathway to adolescent problem behavior, adult criminal behavior and, ultimately, midlife socioeconomic exclusion.
“The real meat of this contribution (of study) is to document the noncognitive, or antisocial behavior pathway, through these life stages as an influential cause of persistent poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage,” Savolainen says.
XINHUA
SinoASEAN mingling to forge closer bonds Vietnamese students enjoy time at Chinese university
Promoting traditional operas in schools
Primary school students in Hefei, Anhui province, learn how to perform Peking Opera under the guidance of their tutor during a lesson.Supported by the central government in a campaign to promote Chinese traditional operas in schools, students will be given the opportunity to appreciate traditional operas at little cost, according to guidelines issued by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China and the ministries of culture, education and finance. Students in all schools and colleges nationwide can watch an opera free of charge every year by 2020. There are hundreds of forms of local opera in China, with Peking Opera being the most famous.Peking Opera and Kunqu Opera are listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. PHOTOS BY ZHANG DAGANG / FOR CHINA DAILY
Bold, virtual race of skeletons
SAN FRANCISCO —Researchers at Stanford University are hosting a competition of computergenerated skeletons in a virtual race, as a crowdsourcing effort to gain better models of the bone, muscles and nerves that may help doctors manage movement disorders like cerebral palsy.
Sixtythree teams havesubmitted 145 ideas to the competition, one of five similar contests created forthe Neural Information Processing Systems conference scheduled for early December in Long Beach, Southern California.
Lukasz Kidzinski, a postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering at Stanford supplies each team with computer models of the human body and the virtualworld that the body must navigate, including stairs, slippery surfaces and more.
The skeletons, in therace, will be running, hopping and jumping as far as they can before collapsing in an electronic heap.
The goal behind the contest, which was dreamed up by Kidzinski, is to betterunderstand how people with cerebral palsy will respond to musclerelaxingsurgery, as the surgery doesnot always work to improve a patient’s gait.
Kidzinski works in thelab of Scott Delp, a professor of bioengineering and of mechanical engineering who has spent decades studying the mechanics of the human body and has collected data on the movements and muscle activity of hundreds of individuals as they walk and run. As a result, they can build accurate models of how individual muscles and limbs move in response to signalsfrom the brain.
However, according to anews release from Stanford,they could not predict how people relearn to walk after surgery, as no one is quite sure how the brain controls complex processes like walking, let alone walking through the obstacle course of daily life or learning how to walk again after surgery.
Machine learning hasreached a point where it could be a useful tool for modeling of the brain’s movement control systems, but for the most part its practitioners have been interested in selfdriving cars, playing complex gameslike chess or serving up more effective online ads.
The virtual competition,instead, could be a “more meaningful problem”. “The time was right for a challenge like this,” Delp was quoted as saying.
In addition to externalchallenges, such as stairs and slippery surfaces, teams in the competition face internal ones, such as weak or unreliable muscles.
They are judged basedon how far their simulated humans make it through those obstacles in a fixed amount of time.
XINHUA
The time was right for a challenge like this.”Scott Delp, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, who has spent decades studying the mechanics of the human body
Guizhou is my second hometown. I hope to spend my
life here after finishing my studies.”Luong Nguyen Hai Nam, a Vietnamese student from Guizhou Minzu University
Foreign students perform in a variety show at the Guizhou Minzu University in January. PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY
On weekends, students from different countries gather for a meal in their dormitory, each cooking a dish from their cuisine.
