Hopkins-Nanjing Center Blog

Student blogger Hope Parker reflects on the required First-Year Interdisciplinary MA Tutorial Course.  Every first-year Master of Arts in International Studies (MAIS) student at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is required to take the interdisciplinary MA Tutorial Course during their first year. Before starting the course, I assumed it would be a research methods class in preparation for writing our theses. As it turns out, although master’s students do take a separate class that includes research methods later on in their studies, the tutorial is meant to help students start thinking about a variety of questions that we may encounter while researching and writing our theses. Given that every master’s student is required to take the course, there are Chinese and international students in each section, and the course is co-taught by an American and a Chinese faculty member. The professors take turns leading the course in English and Chinese, based on English and Chinese readings. Chines...

Student blogger Cady Deck, Certificate ’19, shares her experience volunteer teaching at a local elementary school in Nanjing. This semester, I am one of four international students volunteering as an English teacher at Xijie Elementary School. I talked with Paul Armstrong-Taylor, an economics professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and our volunteer teaching faculty advisor, to learn about the school and how the volunteer teaching program began. The program started in 2010 when he and a first-year master’s student, “realized that many students were interested in volunteering, but because they were only at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for one or two years it was often hard to connect with opportunities.” They reached out to a major Chinese non-profit based in Nanjing, who put them in contact with a local elementary school. Although they began teaching at that elementary school, the school that students volunteer at has changed several times over the years. We teach a class of about ...