wandering the wide world in search of wonders
(Pyongyang subway station) Maybe I should be a journalist instead.
I recently submitted my thesis to the political science department for honors consideration. I wrote about political competition in autocracies, using the natural or accidental deaths of dictators as natural experiments for succession conditions. My findings weren’t earth shattering – statistical significance is not practical/policy significance – but what I learned through the process was valuable.
Posted in College Life, Essays & Writing, Politics.
– April 14, 2010
(Beijing) It’s been a fun ride
My final semester, in full quant gear. It’s time to man up and math up. If I have to get out of school, I’m going out with a bang, not a whimper.
Posted in College Life, Economics, Politics.
– January 14, 2010
(Sun Yat-sen memorial, Zhongshan) Cigarettes in vending machines, probably not such a great idea.
There is a graceless human tendency to wish upon others the ills visited upon oneself. Instead of pointing successors towards short cuts, you relish seeing them clambering through identical hoops.
The author of this particularly insightful observation was describing her experience advising a prospective journalist. She was asked for advice about how to write a book about Africa in a thoughtless way that was not conducive to actually receiving the desired information (it provoked the sentiments quoted), but she offered some very different and still valuable wisdom. In other words, the person got what they needed, but not what they wanted to hear. Unfortunately, it’s more likely that her wisdom was ignored by the intended recipient.
Posted in College Life.
– December 29, 2009
(Chifeng city, Inner Mongolia) Senior year. Gotta work like a dog.
The penultimate semester of my undergrad days. Minimum number of classes, maximum attention to each.
Posted in College Life.
– September 27, 2009
(Hong Kong IFC. View from RED Bar) It’s a long way up, and a long way down.
Congratulations! I’m happy to say that we’ve finished reading through all 1500+ applications, and your name has come out on top. You should all be extremely proud of your accomplishment, as this was the most competitive year in Business Today conference history (our acceptance rate was even lower than that of Princeton itself)!
You come from over 20 countries and 100 colleges; You speak more than 50 languages, you’ve started your own businesses, you’ve won international awards, and you are all around world-class students. It didn’t take me long to realize that I wouldn’t have been accepted to my own conference.
This will be my third time at Business Today, and I’m looking forward to seeing old friends again. I wish that more of my friends from GIS had been accepted, though. Some of them are far more accomplished than I. Unfortunately, I suspect the selectivity of the program rises proportionally with the cost of flying the candidate over, and for me that’s a $2.25 subway ride.
Posted in Business, College Life.
– August 29, 2009
(Wudaokou K-town, Beijing) The wrong question?
She’s very pretty, big sister said. She was, and had an unconventional charm, with the features of those pigtailed red-scarved proletarian heroines rallied from rural mountain villages in the middle provinces to hold up half the sky for the great helmsman. She was strong, productive, innocent – As if she stepped straight out of the kitschy Socialist Realism propaganda posters that adorn his dormitory room.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
– June 8, 2009
Please excuse my poor photoshopping skills…
NEW HAVEN, CT – “Love Story in Yale” (2009, SBS) is the long-awaited sequel to “Wharton Sonata” and “Tsinghua Spring (semester) Waltz“, starring Geoffrey See as the dashing and brilliant business strategy consultant, and Kim Tae-Hee as representative sample Yale girl.
Happy Birthday and Congratulations on getting into Yale! Through our five years of friendship and mostly-healthy competition 
I’ve been inspired by your ceaseless diligence, prudent foresight, deep compassion, elegant style, love of life and adventure, sheer determination, your exponential rate of accomplishments, and the humility you’ve held onto throughout it all. You’re one of my favorite people in the whole world. Here’s wishing you every happiness and success in the years to come! (incl. w/ hot Yale girls 
)
Posted in Bildungsroman, TV Dramas.
– April 20, 2009
(Seoul Metro) There’s only one good reason to watch this drama, and it’s their preppy outfits. Well, okay, there are two, and the second one is not in the ad.
My grandmother took care of me for most of my childhood. She wasn’t aware of any Mozart Effect and let me watch hours and hours of daytime television with her, which back in the early 90s was mostly trashy soap operas on the state-operated Chinese-language channel. (Oddly, my Mandarin never improved very much) Due to the heavy regulations and high economies of scale in the industry, the state channels never faced any competition (outside of TVB imports), and as such they made some truly horrific pablum (they still do). In retrospect, this may have been why trashy soap operas are permanently seared into my psyche now.
Posted in Bildungsroman, TV Dramas.
– March 31, 2009
(Metro station, Washington DC) Seems like I’m always chasing after missed trains…
In retrospect, it was unrealistic to think that I could do much reading or homework while attending a conference, much less running one, but things turned out fine on Monday despite having to skip lectures to catch up on sleep. I had a great time, even if it was a weekend with an average of four hours sleep a night.
Posted in College Life, Politics.
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– February 23, 2009
(Metro station, Washington DC) Making my way to the top just to be on the ground floor…
So I’m off to DC for the weekend to run a conference at George Washington University. The last time I was in DC, I never really got to see the interior of GWU (I saw Gtown, SAIS, and GMU), so this will be a new experience, and I get to see all my friends in DC again too. If only I didn’t have midterms next week and problem sets due on Monday, or I would be able to fully enjoy the conference. Conferences are best enjoyed during the summer… but that’s also when its hardest to take time off work to go.
Posted in College Life, Politics.
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– February 19, 2009
(Wangfujing street, Beijing) My job prospects if I mess things up this semester.
This has to be my toughest semester, with many long days in class and late nights reading or finishing problem sets. This isn’t because I’m taking the maximum courseload, like my peers who accelerated their graduation by a year or more, but because I’m taking hard classes. This is what my days are like.
Posted in College Life.
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– February 13, 2009
(Hong Kong tutoring agency ad) No tutors can compensate for a lack of personal motivation.
My little cousin recently received her O-level grades, which were disappointing to say the least. I wasn’t close to her, but I did try my best to make a difference: I emphasized the importance of attending a good JC and getting grades at least good enough to ensure admission to the highly subsidized local universities, if not secure a taxpayer-funded ride to the Ivy schools. I even gave her my extensive collection of college admissions guides – yes, I was that insane about it.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Education, Singapore.
– January 22, 2009
Now I have an excuse to visit my friends at Brown:
Congratulations! This e-mail is to inform you of your official acceptance to the Ivy Leadership Summit IX, which will be held at Brown University this year, February 6-7. This year’s theme is “Leading in a Global Community,” and will feature panel discussions ranging from sustainable energy, to civic engagement, to cultural leadership. This will be a wonderful leadership development opportunity as well as a chance to meet and form connections with your peers from other Ivy Institutions.
This will be a good time to try out the ‘conference commando’ chapter from Never Eat Alone.
Posted in College Life.
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– December 30, 2008
(Zhongnanhai, Beijing) The red sign reads “Long live the great Chinese Communist Party”. A similar sign on the other side reads “Long live the undefeated Mao Zedong theory”
When I was in Washington DC last summer, I really wanted to join a White House tour, but it never materialized – our internship coordinator put one together before I had joined the think-tank. Instead I got to see the Capitol and various congressional buildings through the course of the summer. The closest I got to the White House was with all the other tourists on the South side of the park, peering through the fence, trying to identify which little speck in the distance was the oval office.
Posted in China Trip, College Life.
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– December 23, 2008
I woke up late and rushed downtown to the Marriott to register for the conference, and I got there just in time for lunch. I enjoyed the strawberry parfait and talked to some of the other participants before the keynote speech, which was quite interesting.
Posted in Business, College Life.
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– November 23, 2008
Registration was today, so here’s what I picked.
Posted in College Life.
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– November 18, 2008
My translation: Caring about the lives of others is to treasure one’s own happiness. (Road sign on Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square, Beijing)
I hate how people assume that I’m going to be an investment banker when I tell them I’m an economics major, so I’ve started to introduce myself as ‘majoring in saving the world’. I considered having that on my business cards: ‘Bachelor of Arts, Saving the World’. I even asked the dean of the college about whether I could do that officially. He asked me “do you think the world can be saved?” I couldn’t give a definite answer, so I guess I’m stuck with my current major.
With the market the way it is, I’ve been looking into grad school options. I attended an info session about the Earth Institute’s PhD program in sustainable development by one of the doctoral students.
Posted in Business, College Life, Development, Economics.
– November 13, 2008
Dear ISFiT participant,
Congratulations! You have been selected to participate in ISFiT 2009, in workshop number 3, Governing systems. We believe that your participation will be a unique contribution to the festival, so we hope that you will be able to come.
That’s the good news.
Posted in College Life.
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– November 5, 2008
Celebrating my arrival! (Hong Kong)
Someone somewhere has made a terrible mistake: Somehow I have been numbered among the hundred “young Chinese leaders”.
Congratulations! You have been selected as a delegate for the Dragon 100 Young Chinese Leaders Forum 2008! The Dragon 100 Young Chinese Leaders Forum 2008, will take place in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region in Mainland China, 22-30 August 2008, where 100 delegates worldwide would register to our hotel in Hong Kong on 21 August 2008.
Posted in China Trip, College Life.
– July 6, 2008
Climbing a mountain with Price Waterhouse Coopers (Mt. Santis, St Gallen)
1. An incredible experience
SGS is truly the best student conference I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been to quite a few of them. I met the most amazing people there – networking opportunities abound – including Nitin from NextBillion. Naturally Geoffrey was there charming the ladies in his bespoke suit.
Posted in Business, College Life, Education.
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– June 28, 2008
That’s a… different kind of leadership (Forbidden City, Beijing)
So I get to stay at the Marriott again:
CONGRATULATIONS! You have been accepted to the 34th Annual International Conference, “The Dynamics of Leadership: Transformation and Innovation in the 21st Century” held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, New York City from November 22nd-25th. Out of over 1,100 applicants, you have been selected to participate in our all-expenses paid affair. The applicant pool was outstanding, with over 100 schools and 30 countries being represented. The conference will be a phenomenal experience as you now have the opportunity to meet over seventy CEOs from across the United States in small seminars and explore New York City with fellow students from all over the world. Get ready to break down Harvard Business School case studies with your peers, discuss crucial topics in politics, business, and entrepreneurship, meet recruiters from top companies, and have an overall incredible experience! To give you an idea of the types of executives you will meet, I’ve attached a list of executives who have participated in our programs over the past year.
Posted in Business, China Trip, College Life.
– June 8, 2008
Detoured to Hong Kong… (Beijing)
A month or two back, when discussing summer plans, I told my friends that I was spending my summer interning with a non-profit in Beijing to pursue a research project on microfinance in China, while traveling widely. I felt proud of myself for not following the crowd of investment bankers with their summer analyst positions in the city or in Hong Kong, squandering their precious summer days and nights (and yes, weekends too) in a cubicle in downtown Central peering through arcane Mandarin spreadsheets. And then the visa situation suddenly changed, and my carefully planned summer of productive work and exciting adventures has been frozen in purgatory.
Posted in China Trip, College Life.
– May 9, 2008
These days I have come to accept that disappointment is a part of life and I should get used to rejection. You win some, you lose some. But it really sucks to have lost the important one.
Posted in College Life, Essays & Writing.
– March 31, 2008
When a friend and I were discussing summer plans and how it seemed like everyone had some kind of financial services job except me, a part of me justified my “you don’t run with the crowd/ you find your own way” with this: it seems so selfish to focus on my personal happiness when I have a responsibility to do so much more. Like save the world. It was only later that it occurred to me that perhaps I’m the selfish one for simply pursuing my own intellectual interests, when my peers pursue lucrative careers not out of greed but a sense of responsibility to support their families in an increasingly uncertain future.
Posted in College Life.
– March 26, 2008
I’m going to Switzerland.
On behalf of the International Students’ Committee (ISC), we would like to cordially thank you for your excellent contribution to this year’s St. Gallen Wings of Excellence Award. We are very delighted about the challenge you have undertaken when working on the topic “Global Capitalism – Local Values”. In the past few weeks the jury has thoroughly evaluated the around 1,000 entries in order to choose those 200 students who will be invited to the 38th St. Gallen Symposium.
Posted in Business, College Life, Development, Economics.
– March 6, 2008
