My journey
Featuring Dr. Wei Wei, LSU
In this video, Wei talks about his experience transitioning from being an undergraduate student in China to a graduate student in England.
Below is Wei’s step-by-step account of the changes required in his expectations and perspectives towards learning and academic success. In the video he also gives specific advice to students on how to make the transition to an international university such as RMIT University Vietnam.
Leave a comment below to let Wei know how his experience connects to yours or your students’.
8 Responses to “My journey”
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- - January 5, 2013
Hi Wei,
Thanks for this video. What you’ve reflected in this video was exactly what I experienced when I was in university. Before entering university, I was warned that learning at university is very difficult and different from high school. There’d be no homework checking, no mini tests, no dictating. So how would I learn in university?, I panicked. I prepared for my first lessons at university by reading text books in advance. I soon felt bored with reading thick books without understanding the ‘superb’ knowledge or remembering anything. I was afraid of not knowing how to learn well, what I should do, what books I should read, what topic I should write about, even what format my teacher prefers. I worried that if I wrote this and that, my teacher would disagree and consequently I would receive low mark. Interestingly, like you said in the video, I was likely to agree with ideas from famous authors. I tried to quote books written by big authors and my teachers so that they would appreciate my essay more than others’. I never thought that I should or could argue with them, but only tried to understand them, accept what they wrote and quote them in my essays to show that I had read a lot. Now I realized that I wasted too much time worrying about such things.
Love your video so much. Thanks for sharing! Seeing this video will save a lot time for those who are worrying about what they are expected at an international university and are applying new learning methods to succeed, starting by asking a lot of questions.
Van
Thanks Van:) I guess our students may take the same journey to some extent in RMIT Vietnam, such as create their own academic celebrity or role model and follow their comments without any evaluation.
Dr. Wei,
I am absolutely thrilled that you have posted this video. In your story, you have effectively brought together many of the ideas that we have just finished exploring over the past term in my Advanced English class. I’m sharing this with my students on Facebook right away, and I’ll find a way to use it in my upcoming class.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Joel
Hi, Joel. really happy to see you find this video relevant to your students in English classes. Hope my experiences can help these kids change their expectations/learning strategies as quick as possible in RMIT.
thank you very much for your comments, Cristina. It will be great to find out students’ reactions to this video.
Dr. Wei
Thanks very much for your video. I have just shared it with all our Australian Development Scheme scholarship students who are preparing for post graduate study in Australian universities having already studied for their professional qualifications in Vietnamese universities and have some adventures and challenges ahead.
Karen
Thanks Dr. Wei very much. I find this very helpful for my undergraduate studies. Now I’ve known some ways to be a better learner.