Hopkins-Nanjing Center Blog

As anyone who has lived through the 2020 pandemic can tell you, it is no secret that virtual community building is not without its challenges. There are many school activities that we simply cannot participate in. Moreover, there is much that is missed in a virtual setting. The fact that we aren’t living in the same space means that many shared experiences and nuances are harder to develop. Nonetheless, our cohort has developed many innovative strategies to build community virtually. MAIS student Nathan Rose talks about overcoming these challenges, and introduces his own role in rallying students together at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.    One challenge in building a virtual community is time—more specifically, time zones and time differences. It’s known that the US and China are on almost completely opposite time schedules: the difference between the Eastern Time Zone and Beijing time is usually 12 hours (though increases to 13 during the fall and winter). This “perfectly...

Nancy Brancati introduces the new Hopkins-Nanjing Center chapter of the SAIS Global Women in Leadership Club that she and several of her classmates founded.   Creating a community of HNC students virtually is no easy feat, especially when my classmates and I are spread out all over the world. But we’ve been doing well so far—the student committee ( banwei ) established a language partner program, hosts movie nights, and is also in the process of organizing a talent show. The non-Chinese students have been having weekly Chinese Corner   中文角   meetings since the early-admission students were admitted in December! But I knew something was missing. Though I’ve been connected to my classmates for a long time now, I quickly noticed that almost all of my friends at the HNC are male and thus also found a strong need to connect with the women of the HNC. At least in my cohort, I noticed that the female international students were outnumbered, but there was a more balanced ratio of...

Claudia Vernotti, MAIS '14, reflects on the value of her experiences at the HNC, and how the skills she acquired led to her career as Co-founder and Director of ChinaEU, a nonprofit organization which helps foster cooperation between European and Chinese companies in the digital sector.  Tell us a bit more about your career and current role. How much have you built upon your HNC experience, and how much did you have to learn on the job? The HNC gave me the direction, the inspiration, and the cult ural sensibility to be able to pursue a career that matches two different worlds and business culture s.  I did the one-year Certificate at the HNC and then opted to stay in Nanjing also for the master’s program. By that time, I had already lived in China for almost 3 years, but something told me that I was not done with China yet. First, I was not happy with my level of Chinese: learning Chinese is a never-ending process, but I wanted to get better. I was really excited about the ide...

This fall, Hopkins-Nanjing Center and SAIS Europe students had the opportunity to take the seminar “The Indo-Pacific: Cooperation and Contestation” instructed by Professors Hanns Maull and David Arase. As a “seminar,” the course is discussion-focused, with students coming together each week to discuss a different issue, country, or region in the Indo-Pacific.  Professor Maull is an Adjunct Professor of International Relations at SAIS Europe and one of Germany’s leading academic foreign policy analysts, working on German foreign policy and international relations in the Indo-Pacific.    Professor Arase is a Resident Professor of International Politics at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, specialized on Japan, East Asia, Globalization, and International Relations.    The Indo-Pacific Seminar marks the first course jointly-taught across the SAIS Europe and HNC campuses, with HNC Chinese students joining virtually from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China, HNC Internationa...

Certificate student Elizabeth Gonzales takes us through a day in her life as a Hopkins-Nanjing Center student taking classes virtually.    “This is really happening,” I thought to myself when I completed looking over the Hopkins-Nanjing Center orientation schedule. At that moment, I was feeling a frisson of excitement and fear. After two years of postponing my enrollment into the program, I am finally attending the HNC. I could not help but wonder - am I ready? Do I  actually  belong here? What if I fail? What if my professors and classmates laugh at me for not speaking Mandarin perfectly? By the end of the day, I had given myself a headache from spending a great deal of time putting myself through unnecessary stress. I did not realize until later that what I was feeling was called “imposter syndrome.” Imposter syndrome  is defined as “the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s effort...