By Student Ambassador Yunfei
Dauntingly gazing at a blank sheet of paper, I knew I had to face the barrier of writing essays. Studying in the U.S makes me aware of the difference between writing in Chinese and English. Because I was so used to writing essays based on a template, I had a hard time finding my voice. However, it is obviously in stark contrast with the American way, where critical thinking skills are the key component of writing. The disparity fills me with a sense of disappointment. Yet, my ambition of catching up with fellow students and becoming an effective writer kept pushing me forward. I decided to face the challenge to share my academic journey with you by writing this blog. To improve my writing skills, I have used a useful website called Khan Academy where I can learn how native speakers use the language flexibly. I desperately absorb as much information as possible and cram it into my brain to catch up with the fellow students in my class. I struggled during the process. But through multiple sessions of edits and re-edits, I can express my ideas more concisely and clearly in writing; I have developed analytical skills and no longer feel that “filling a paper” is a daunting process. I feel energized when I can efficiently share my voice with readers and discover the joy of writing. I then have come to realize the importance of competent writing skills, not only for academics, but this skill can also be applied to many different fields. During this learning process, I would like to specially honor my professors (Prof. Yaping Li, Prof. Robert Baden, and Prof. Rudy Ramirez) at the College of San Mateo. They helped sharpen my academic skills and have encouraged me to be a better version of myself. Furthermore, another part of my success is credited to a team of amazing academic counselors from CSM including Lydia Chen, Mary Valenti and many other counselors. I also want to thank the CSM/UC Berkeley Scholar program counselor, Johnny Leon. They all helped me with preparing for the transfer process from start to finish and diligently assisting me with the tedious application forms for four-year universities. Because of them, the whole transfer process was a lot smoother and much more efficient. I also want to pat myself on the back--my efforts were paid off. In spring 2020, I got accepted to UC Berkeley and UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Barbara, which are the most well-known and prestigious universities in the U.S. I am proud to say that these achievements is evident that I didn't give up! I continued to track my process step by step. It also reminds me of this expression, "There is no elevator to success--I must take the stairs" . Lastly, it has been more than two years since I have started my journey in the U.S. as a college student. Thinking back on these years, I can still vividly remember every part of it, the excitement and challenges I have had since the day I went abroad and set my feet on the path of independent life. I am ready for a new chapter in my life. Thank you College of San Mateo for the wonderful memories of the first two and half years of my journey in the U.S.
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By Student Ambassador Yeni
On the Playstation Vita(PSV), it has hundreds of Otome games. 在PSV上有一百多个乙女游戏。 However, since Otome games were not mainstream in gamers' group, game companies didn't translate most of them to other languages during the PSV era (such as English, Chinese, Korean). Therefore, I collected a short recommendation list of translated Otome games on Switch(most of them have English and Chinese version) 然而,由于乙女游戏受众群体较为小众,许多游戏厂商在PSV时代并没有将它们翻译为其他语言(比如英,中,韩文)。 因此,我收集了一个比较短的推荐列表,里面是一些Switch上已有翻译的乙女游戏(以英文与中文为主)。 I searched for them on Japan Eshop. 此链表根据于日本任天堂Eshop。 Otome games(乙女) on Nintendo switch: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/software/feature/otome.html Japanese, Chinese, English: ヒミツの獣男子 Nightshade/百花百狼 新撰組アメイジング~火照る躰と恋炎~ 戦国姫歌~時果の契り~ Dandy Shot 逆転吉原~扇屋編~ 逆転吉原~菊屋編~ Japanese, English: スイートルームで悪戯なキス 恋してしまった星の王子 ~誓願院編~ 恋してしまった星の王子 ~制裁院編~ 今宵、妖しい口づけを ~雅・京牙・沙門編~ 今宵、妖しい口づけを ~綺龍・千影・雪之丞編~ にゃんらぶ ~私の恋の見つけ方~ 学園CLUB~放課後のヒミツ~ アイリス魔法学園~Vinculum Hearts~ 妖かし恋戯曲 帝國カレイド-万華の革命- Japanese, Chinese: 囚われのパルマ Refrain デラックス エディション(and other versions) By William
You know you are completely alone when you enter the room, scan your surroundings, and see zero familiar faces. Trust me, Ha! Everyone has been in this same situation before. You started to get nervous, and be like, umm should I stand here? should I take the free concessions? Or am I even supposed to be here!?!? At this point, you have 2 choices: you can remain hidden from these people, or maybe you start working your way up, introducing yourself, one person to another, and you will end up knowing almost everyone in the room. From my experience, I think you should start by taking a couple deep breaths (...inhale & exhale…), and start to expose yourself to those people. I know it will not be easy for almost everyone, especially if you are an introvert, but think about this: You faced your fears, started to talk to them, and soon enough you became friends! Let me tell you that not everyone you meet will be your friends, but so what? There are many more out there waiting to talk to you in this world. If you indeed chose to talk to them, and you become good friends, you may never know when you will need their help or maybe, they have the information and opportunity that you are looking for. As the first part of this blog series on How to Expand your Network, my first assignment (hopefully, you will do this if you are reading me) is for you to try to talk to new people, get out of your comfort zone, and remember: not everyone you meet will be your friends, but there will be millions more in the world that you will meet. By Student Ambassador Suhana During this pandemic, the only thing we can do is to take good care of ourselves, each other, and work our way towards success. I have a lot more time for myself so my goal is to take advantage of it and push myself for job preparedness and lifelong learning. I personally think we can make these days super productive by figuring out what we want to do in the future. I am majoring in Management Information System which is a comprehension of Business and Technology. I have always been focused on getting experiences not only because my major requires, but also realizing that planning ahead and developing myself professionally is where my passion lies. I have always been curious about how the professional world would look, how I would prepare myself for the job of my dream? As soon as I graduated from high school, I did internship in a bank and I used to be a candidate for Model United Nations to gain experience. I have been working as a student assistant for two years at College of San Mateo. These jobs helped me walk the path towards how a skillful job would look like. The quarantine made me realized that it's time for me to think outside of the box and start preparing myself for a real/ professional job and start looking for opportunities around me. The first step for my job preparedness and lifelong learning was to update my resume. It is really important for us to realize what we have done to push ourselves even more. I added everything that I have achieved so far to my profile, academic backgrounds, skills, and work experience. My resume motivates me to broaden my skills, have more job experience and boost my GPA. The second step that I took for my job preparedness and lifelong learning was updating my Linked In profile. I displayed my resume and I started looking for pages that I am interested in and turned on all the notification buttons for the opportunities that I deserve. It is helping me in professional networking, display my resume, and enhance my professional reputation by posting updates and interacting with people. Additionally, there are courses that Linked In provides for free such as Excel, Microsoft Access, Data Science and Analytics that I am interested in learning. I realize that it is good to limit myself with the job positions and careers that I would be interested in working for the long term. Being a Management Information System student, I did a lot of research about what kind of job offers I can attract with this major. While researching, I kept several things on my mind, such as linking my major and my career, my personality, and most importantly, my interests. In researching, I learned important things for the future about how career planning should be based on knowing my values, identifying my skills and discovering career planning along with salary, and research career options. I was finally able to pick top job positions that I would call dream positions. To be specific, computer system analyst, information analyst, database administrator, and network administrator are my top choices. Ultimately, I aim to work for the best companies like Cisco, Workday, Apple, Adobe, HP Inc, Tesla using my Management Information System degree. All of these companies focus on Information Technology. With years of experiences in great companies like these, my goal is to start my own company and make it the best workplace. By Student Ambassador Left
Ever since I came to the United States, Life was never the same as when I was back at home. I was in charge of my own life, my time and how much I spent. Since I had to rely on my parent's money a semester ago, eating out was not as bad or me because it was not my money that I was spending but after I got a job on campus, I started becoming more independent and started budgeting my money for food, rent and other essentials that I needed. Ever since the spread of COVID-19 became worldwide, eating out or ordering deliveries has become very expensive, so I decided to learn how to cook. I spent my free time, looking up recipes, learning from you tube videos and from some of my roommates who knew how to cook. I noticed how it is so much cheaper than ordering food and you can eat whatever you want with the right ingredients. This helped me make use of my spare time and I gained a useful life skill as a result. Since the lock down period, I tried keeping myself occupied by using Duo lingo, a language learning app and started learning some Indonesian and Mandarin Chinese and used some online talking platforms to random chat with other people around the world to see how they are doing and how they are handling the situation and it is really an eye opener to talk to different people from different countries. My suggestion to everyone is to make use of their time, such as learning a new skill, language or reaching out to your loved ones in this time and also finishing that one Netflix show that you always wanted to. By Student Ambassador Yeni
I hope to be a creator. Since I was a child, I have been deeply touched by all kinds of fantastic performances in the game; therefore, I also have many of my world outlook settings. I've tried many different types of games. With the development of the times and science and technology, the Word Adventure Game is not popular among the new players. Word adventure games usually focus on love, which can be divided into different types according to gender and sexual orientation. In the game I tried, I deeply felt that the Otome game (face to females) has weaker marketing than the ordinary gal games (usually face to males) and the gender equality game in recent years. Moreover, the Otome game design is unitary, and this type of game are generally dominated by women. Therefore, I hope to try to make a kind of Otome game that can be enjoyed by people of all genders and sexual orientations. 我希望能成为创作者。我自小接触游戏,深受游戏中各种各样的精彩演出感动;因此,我也有许多自己的世界观设定。我尝试过许多游戏种类。随着时代与科技的进步,在庞大的游戏种类中,文字冒险游戏渐渐不受新人玩家欢迎。文字冒险游戏通常以恋爱为主,而这又能以性别和性取向分别出不同种类。在我尝试的游戏中,我深深感受到女性向恋爱游戏(指攻略男性为主的恋爱游戏)具有比普通的男性向游戏和最近几年出的同性恋爱游戏较弱的营销。游戏设计反而单一化,并且群体通常以女性为主。因此,我希望能试着制作一款各种性别与性取向的人都能享受的乙女游戏。 Plot and the character design are two very important factors in Word Adventure Game. Because the word game does not emphasize the superb programming technology, so anyone can create a wonderful story with a simple program. In order to improve my writing ability, I am trying to learn script writing and character design. At the same time, I will analyze the charming male characters in light novels, comics, and animations. 剧情与人设是文字冒险游戏中十分重要的两个因素。因为文字游戏并不强调高超的编程技术,因此任何人都可以以简单的程序创造出精彩的故事。为了提高自己的写作能力,我正在试着学习剧本写作及人物设计。同时,我会分析轻小说,漫画,动画中富有魅力的男性角色们。 By Student Ambassador Mony As the spread of the virus grows faster and faster, we were ordered to stay at home and avoid going outside unnecessary to prevent further spread meaning that we would have some spare time saved from having to travel from home to school and back. For sure, this is a very strange time and I don’t think that we will have a time like this anytime soon. Personally, I don’t think being stuck at home is boring at all. In fact, I think that it’s therapeutic. I have more time for myself which I wouldn’t get if I were to go to school, mostly because I would easily spend all of those time on the commute to and from school. I spend the extra free time exploring myself, trying to learn something new and interesting. One thing that I got to learn with the time that I have is 3D designing. I’ve been wanting to learn 3D designing for a few years now but I’ve been procrastinating on it and I didn’t really know where to start in general. My interest with 3D designing started from the artworks of one of my favourite bands. I was very inspired by their artworks and I thought it looked really cool. I started to look into this for general information on 3D designing and some tutorials online and soon enough, I was exposed to this new world of 3D designing. I didn’t really know where to start to get into 3D creation until later last year when I found a free 3D software called “Blender” that is being widely used and considered as a reliable software for 3D design. The first time I opened up the program, I didn’t really know what I was doing, the program interface was very intimidating, especially for a beginner who had no clue. After a few tutorial videos on Youtube, I got to understand the menu system and was able to work on basic tasks. Using the software to create different objects in a virtual environment is very fun but time consuming. I was only able to create a few fun projects myself ever since I first started it. (Might be because it’s a time consuming process or it’s just me procrastinating hahaha) My projects so far are just “experiments” of what I’ve learned from the tutorials on Youtube.
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