Hopkins-Nanjing Center Blog

 The Hopkins-Nanjing Center Office of International Admissions will be closed on Monday, December 31 and Tuesday, January 1.  We look forward to answering your application questions when the office reopens on Wednesday.  Happy New Year!

As you finish up (or for some of you, start!) your application to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, keep these tips and guidelines in mind: Transcripts If you haven't already done so, request official transcripts from any institutions at which you've taken undergraduate or graduate-level courses and have them mailed to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center Washington Support Office at 1740 Massachusetts Ave NW Washington, D.C. 20036. We accept both hard copy transcripts and electronic transcripts, but both need to be official documents. Transcripts listing study abroad grades and/or transfer credits are required unless both the grades and credits are reflected on the primary undergraduate transcript. Non-English-language transcripts: If your transcript is in a language other than English, you are asked to provide an official translation of the entire transcript and an explanation of the grading system of the university. You are strongly encouraged to use a credential evaluation servic...

2011 Christmas Banquet at the HNC The Hopkins-Nanjing Center Office of International Admissions will be closed on Monday, December 24 and Tuesday, December 25.  We will be reopen on Wednesday the 26th so please feel free to email or call us then at 202-663-5806 with any application questions.  Happy holidays!

 Have you ever wondered who is processing your CAL tests , reading your applications as part of the admissions committee, and tweeting on behalf of the HNC?  Meet the HNC international admissions team!  We are based in Washington, DC so that we can support you every step of the way on your journey from applicant to student.  You'll hear from us about everything from the application process and financial aid to visas, billing, and pre-departure information.  Even better, we are all graduates of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center certificate program so can speak firsthand to the student and alumni experience.  Katie Brooks, Admissions Officer:  The HNC International Admissions Team Now based in Washington, Katie previously spent four years living in China and Singapore.  An alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is also a 2009 graduate of the Certificate program at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. After completing the Certificate...

This is a quick reminder about the Online Admissions Chat that will be taking place this Wednesday, December 19 th from 10:00AM-12:00 PM (EST) .  Chatting with us will be Admissions Coordinators Margaux Fimbres (Certificate ’11) and Lauren Szymanski (Certificate ’12) as well as current Hopkins-Nanjing Center MAIS student Joey Feng.  Join us to hear current students and admissions staff share firsthand experience and valuable advice, and be sure to bring any questions you may have about the application process, academics, or student life. To participate, click on this link as early as ten minutes prior to the beginning of the chat and login as a guest. Remember our application deadlines are January 7 (Five-Semester Option) and February 1 (Certificate and MAIS), so be sure to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn about the Center from those who know it best.   Can't make this chat?  We will be holding two more between now and February 1 at dif...

HNC MAIS student Natalie Sammarco sends an update from Nanjing: "It can be easy to get caught up in studies when the classes are so rigorous. It can be even more distracting being away from home during the holidays. We often forget to appreciate Nanjing as a city filled with history: a former capital city, and the place where the Nanjing Massacre occurred.  December 13th marked the 75th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre. The event was horrific and thousands were killed at the hands of the Japanese. That said, China wishes us all to remember the incident by blowing sirens in and around the city for a half hour on December 13th, the day when the Japanese Army originally reached Nanjing. Hearing the sirens is surreal. They are a deafening noise all over the city. Some students in the center chose to commemorate the incident by showing movies, including Flowers of War , in the lounge that night. Seeing these movies made us all appreciate the history of the city in which w...

Mr. Mao Continuing with our trend of introducing HNC personalities , we are pleased to present HNC's unofficial mascot, Mr. Mao.  For those who may not speak Chinese, mao means cat.  This year's BanWei (student committee) selects a weekly HNCer of the Week and Mr. Mao easily won the honor during the inaugural week. Mr. Mao is just one member of the residential community that is the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.  In addition to the classrooms, library, lounge, cafeteria, and auditoriums, the Center is also home to a five-story dorm.  Certificate students all live in double rooms in this on-campus dorm while MAIS students have the option of living in a single or double room.  For students living in double rooms, we make as many Chinese-International roommate pairings as possible and many alumni have reported that living with a Chinese classmate was a highlight of their experience.  Despite the Center's state-of-the-art facilities though, Mr. ...

Washington University, St. Louis Middlebury College Brigham Young University University of North Carolina University of Milan The fall recruiting season has officially concluded and our entire admissions staff is now back in the office and available to answer your application questions.  This fall our DC-based admissions team visited 95 US universities and three each in Canada, the UK, and Italy.  The American Academic Coordinator in Nanjing, Angela Chang, also visited dozens of study abroad programs in Beijing, Shanghai, Harbin, and Hangzhou and also recently returned from a recruiting trip to Korea.  As we've mentioned , about 15% of international students are citizens of countries other than the US, so we were excited to reach out to new countries this year.  We also listened to your suggestions on Twitter when creating the recruiting calendar, so if you would like an admissions representative to visit your school next year, plea...

Holiday greetings from the Hopkins–Nanjing Center! I’m Jason Patent, American Co-Director of the HNC. I have the great privilege of spending my days working in service of this absolutely one-of-a-kind venture. When people first hear about the HNC, the specific questions they have vary, but the common thread is that they’re always intrigued. This is with good reason. Now in its 27 th year, the HNC is still very much on the cutting edge of graduate education. As a linguist I’ve noticed that even now it’s hard to find simple language to describe what we do here and how we do it. One of the ways language evolves is by creating common understanding in a community of speakers, so that we can use simple labels — chair, apple, door — and understand each other. For a speaker to be understood by a hearer, both must share a common “world,” embodied in language and culture. Much of what makes the HNC hard to describe is the uniqueness of our culture.  HNC Co-Director Jason Pate...

HNC MAIS student Natalie Sammarco sends an update from Nanjing following the week-long fall break which coincided with the American Thanksgiving holiday: HNC students bake holiday cookies in 2011 "The Thanksgiving (Autumn) Break is now over and there seems like a long haul until the end of the semester, which ends in the second week of January. As for Thanksgiving, though, there are a couple different places to go to get a decent holiday meal, albeit, they are in Shanghai and Beijing :-) Our local import grocery store sells turkeys in Nanjing and it’s possible to cook a Thanksgiving dinner, which one of the students in the Center did! The upside is that they also sell legitimate ingredients to make pumpkin pie, without which this season would not be complete! It’s nice to have a small break to get a change of scenery as the weather gets colder. No matter what, we all feel a bit more refreshed going into the final weeks of the term after having a week to recoup from our acad...