Freshman Seminar – Spring 2015, DTD

*The first picture is my last summer in China.( I miss them!)

People in the second one are my new friends in my first school in U.S..

The third one is the first snow in my life!

I came here one year ago. It was winter.After one week passed, I saw the first snow in my life!I was so excited and made a big smile-snow-face. Then I stared this car and kept a long silent, I realized that it’s a different environment, a different world and would be a different life. ” Are you ready to embrace your new life?”

However, the truth is, life is tough at the beginning. Maybe it is because the winter here is too cold and too long, and it even makes me afraid of snowing. I began to miss my city where I have friends who I grew up with, I have my families who I can trust mostly and I have lots of foods that I am familiar with. I have home there, but I just have a house here.

Then, lucky for me, I found a school and met new friends there. It’s easier to go forward without loneliness. I gradually got used to my new life——hang out with new friends, try to do different kinds of jobs to expand my horizon and plan several trips to embrace nature and diverse cultures. Those 8 months went  past in the blink of an eye, I realized that I have to plan my future——college is clearly the first step to go. So I spent two months from memorizing new vocabularies to finishing SAT, and luckily I cam to Baruch!( I thought that was the busiest time within 20 years, but now I admit the first semester is the winner! ⊙﹏⊙)

It is not easy for some international students to handle their complicated situations. They need to balance integrating new environment and keeping touch with old life. Sometimes they will have a sense of distance from their old friends and feel tired to adapt themselves to the new life. Nonetheless, they keep their passions to challenge and achieve their dreams, no matter how this feeling of not belonging will make them depressed.

Because most of them are dreamers!

New York, USA
First time come to the new place where is different from my birthplace,
I hardly express my feelings in words.
When I move to the new place, no one understands my loneliness, and no one understands why I’m so brave.
Why do I move to here?Family?Study? Or others?
I think that study is the most significant issues that I move to here.
I know that from then on, I have to learn many new things, and face many problems in life.
From then on, life is full of various challenges, and there are no any excuses that I can give up.
In order to hide my loneliness and fear, I always keep smiling.
Otherwise, when I go back to my home country during holidays, I myself don’t want to come back to here.
Don’t ask me the reasons, as I don’t know how to explain why I will like that.
On the other hand,
I am thankful, for I can gain new life experience.
For example, I can make friends with different countries.
Also, I can learn various cultures from them.
Every time, I am trying to be a New Yorker: play hard, work hard.
And I ask myself “Is this my home?”
Yet, no clear answer ever comes up to my mind.
I hope one day I will know the answer.
No matter how things are going on in the future, I believe that everything will be ok at the end. If it is not ok, it’s not the end.

Everyday I count on the days that are left to go back to my country. When I think of going back, it means staying there forever, not just for vacation. But I know it, and everyone knows it. I can’t. The people who are staying, still fighting, like my parents, I admire them. The people who left, chasing after new dreams in another country, like me, I understand them. Leaving Venezuela is like getting divorced but still being in love. It’s been so hard to me to understand that I can’t go back now, that I have to get a higher education in another country, that I could only go back when things turn good. And that is all because the insecurity, shortage of daily products, and where there is no justice for people. I know that someday it will change, but for now… I gotta move on.

Hi, that’s me in the back. My last day as an ESL student. Ah it was a very stressful day because it was the last time to see each other and also me and Carolina (the cute latino girl with the hat) had to represent my class during the showcase. Hopefully, we did the best presentation of the ceremony and it was very fun. After that, I had to say good bye to my best friend of this class: Soejong (The pretty Korean girl standing in front of me), because she had to return to South Korea. That was not fun at all. This day is very important for me because it was the first significant day that I had since I arrived here in the United States and I miss them so much….

I am going to share this funny story of mine. I come from Albania. I was raised in the capital city of Albania, Tirana. A place where the climate is warm. It does not really snow. Actually i really never remember building a snowman. I finished high school with pretty good results and i thought to do something different with my life. I decided to move to NYC to finish my college. I came here at 01/08/2015. The first snow in NY happened the next day. I was pretty excited obviously, because it was something totally new to me. Snow was only something i had seen on movie theaters. I went outside, with a big childish smile on my face, and started playing with the snow. I got tons of pictures, i built a snowman, did a snow-angel, cleaned the snow from the sidewalk. It was fun. The next day the snow still kept falling. I still went out playing with the snow and having fun. This happened every day for the next week. Then i started realizing that snow was not that fun. Actually now i think that snow sucks. The date is 3/21/2015 and it is still snowing. Alright winter, that is enough. It is not fun anymore.

.

I wrote a poem with letters of my first and last name.

Hello, I’m Monica Feng!

Sorry for posting this late, but I posted it on the wrong page. So here it’s my post.

So, I just created a slideshow to show you guys a little bit more about me.

http://slide.ly/view/5f467ce4e706c2559e5d0729a8a28589

I was born and raised in Venezuela, however, I’m a descendent of Chinese people. Being a Venezuelan born Chinese always surprises people. And the first thing they usually ask is: “Do you speak Spanish?” Yes, it is my native language.

(The first image shows the flag of my country and the background music is a song about my country called: Cancion Venezuela.)

When I was 9, my father send me to China to study Chinese and to explore the culture. I get to know a lot of friends from all over the world. Also, people like me, they were also from Venezuela. If you were to ask me the most valuable moment in my life, I would say the time I studied in China. I did not only learned Chinese, I also met REAL friends. I do still talk with them and some of them are also in Baruch College. Lucky me! Huh?

No later, I went back to Venezuela when I finished primary school in China. I was the able to speak Mandarin, Cantonese, English and, of course, Spanish. I felt so happy to be back in Venezuela. I love the people out there, I love being close to my family and most importantly I felt like being home. I continued to study in my country, but then I realized I needed something more. Something like getting to know more about the world outside. I wanted to study in North America. So, once again I left home and went all alone to Toronto, Canada. It was not easy at first, because it was extremely cold there. When I say extremely cold i don’t mean by minus 17 celsius degrees, it’s minus 40 celsius degrees! It’s crazy! My favorite thing I did in Canada is studying French, I really like learning different languages, because when I hear languages that I don’t know I would probably go crazy trying to analyze it.

I’ve always had that dream of studying in NYC. For me, it’s the city where dreams come true. Now, I’m here in NYC! I am going to study hard and chase after my dreams. I will focus on my goals and be the person I want to be in the future — a really successful businesswomen.

I might look serious, but in fact I am friendly, cheerful and outgoing. I love meeting friends from all over the world.

My name is Amla and I come from Albania. I grew up in Tirana which is the capital city of my country and where the other part of my family lives.

Those two people in the picture are my younger brother and sister who I miss very much.

When I was little, I took violin classes for almost six years and I really enjoyed playing it.

In my country, my name means sweet which is maybe the reason why I like making cakes and also eating them a lot 😛

These are some of the things I wanted to share with you 🙂

http://slide.ly/view/20c28094050a9f1ea9054f32d7e06ad8

Some pictures are taken from Google.

video:            http://slide.ly/view/9a3b33bd6631da583acb91bf745c2171