I did not have a lot of experience with teamwork before I came to America, due to the different education model, but different concepts and cultures but the same element of “the idea of been one”, Chinese education celebrates education success as a whole, while the American and other western countries believe in success individually by doing teamwork. At here in UWB, we believe that IAS students develop their collaboration and shared leadership abilities by learning to work with others to identify dimensions of a project, generate and refine ideas, follow through on the consequences of collective decisions, and pursue specific tasks without losing a sense of the whole. Thus, I agree and following the lead by our school concept, and based on the different ideas, my personal understanding on this learning objective is collaboration and shared leadership is a great and extremely important skills for everyone in the world to have, while we take a broad look in the whole world, nothing can be done with the only one power of individual, but leaders are required as well. Just like building a tower, we need designers, engineers and hundreds of the workers to complete the building, but the leaders keep everyone in a suitable path and pace. Same as the successfulness of a person, we were given our life by our parents and educated by lots of instructors and work with different people around the world in our future life, but we are the leader of our own, our ideology tells us what to do or not to do. 

Right after I entered college life, I found the turning point that from a teenager to a young adult, which I’m having much more chances and freedom to express my personal opinions. By the leading of the education provided by UWB, I have increasingly grown the awareness of assumptions on viewing different issues, social phenomenon and basically, everything happened in my life. Remember that we always had conflicts in discussions of high school classes, we always wanted to talk over the different opinions from ours, and always ask why other people in different ways as we do, until I started my college and followed by the learning objective of Critical and creative thinking.

I understand the words Critical and Creative thinking as a contrasting way of thinking because, under critical thinking, it asked to think in a rigorous, clear, and logical way. Such as doing research, we are skillfully applying, analyzing synthesizing and evaluating the information. On the contrary, creative thinking asked us to open up our mind, think in an abnormal, unusually thinking mold to come up with something new. Like what I did in my video production class, screenwriting part always asked us to come up with something could interest people, and people always tend to interested in something unnormal. 

Many of the classes I took after I attend in School of IAS, the words “Race and Gender”, “Homelessness”, “Refugees”, “marginalized group” and “Inequality” always appears in our discussion. Or, I could say right after I came to America, I started to learn about those words. The most impressed phenomenon of the United States for me is this is a diverse country, there are people coming from different country, race, and culture promoting social and economic development. Same as the learning objective provided by UWB, Diversity, and Equity. It says, “we see diversity work as both individual and institutional actions taken to counteract relations of power and difference, relations historically characterized by the social exclusion, marginalization, and oppression of one group and the unearned privilege and overvaluation of another.” College as an epitome of the whole society, our school taught us to keep our own individuality and accept others as well. 

Interdisciplinary was a huge word for me, I even looked up online for the definition after attended in the major. What I understand it as a media and communication student, we are required to own the skill to combine different ideas and skills together in order to express our opinion, achieve certain purposes or reflect on social problems and so on. The project in Visual Communication class asked for a project that combines the skills we learned before with the knowledge gained in this class, as a group to build up a project. We came up with a video talking about how social media forms women’s body image nowadays. the course as a whole can be described in one phrase which “How to see the world”, within this course, we covered how to see ourselves through selfies how to see the world through screens, how to see a different culture and so on. 

The writing has always been a concern for me since middle school, or I could say ever since I have to write. I’m an international student from China, and I came here to the American when from high school. I say that writing is always a concern does not mean that I can’t write, but I have to spend double or triple of the time than other students around to complete. But I know writing and communication is the type of skill we must have not only for IAS student but for all people. The description under this learning objective says that “IAS students develop their writing and communication abilities by advancing an awareness of the interconnected relationships between purpose, audience, author, and context. We learn to communicate our purpose effectively to diverse audiences through writing presentation and other media. And so on.” I totally agree with that, too little or too many words will not make the clearest sense and deliver one’s message accurately to another, which will decrease the efficiency bidirectionally. On top of that, clear on the audiences are also one of the important elements in writing and communication, which determined whether the one who receives the message is correct.