Another of the classes that I'm taking this semester is Chinese language class. I am taking the class at Concordia through the Tri-College system, which is amazing because I was really sad that NDSU does not offer the class. Anyway, as I have mentioned earlier I've actually already taken a few years of Chinese in high school, so I was going in with at least a little bit of knowledge.

I knew right away that it was going to be an enjoyable class because I instantly started liking the teacher and his method of teaching. The first couple of weeks we were learning how to read the english alphabet version of the language so we would be able to put sounds to characters. A lot of that I remembered so it wasn't too difficult, and I was anxious to start getting into actual words and speaking the language.

The last few weeks of the class have definitely gotten a bit tougher with having to memorize all of the characters and the meanings, but it has been a lot of fun. It is really rewarding to be able to work hard learning things and see the efforts pay off. I really am looking forward to learning even more as the semester goes on, and even beyond that as well.

I want to talk a little bit about the classes that I am taking this semester and how they are going so far. Over the last year or so I have become extremely interested in learning different computer programming languages because technology is becoming increasingly relevant in so many fields. So I decided to take Computer Science 1, Introduction to programming, this semester. One of my good friends is majoring in Computer Engineering and has previously introduced me to some of the basic concepts. So going into this class the first few weeks was content that I already had a decent grasp on.

 We are now making it to content that is new to me, and it is extremely interesting while a little challenging at the same time. It really requires you to think a different way than you are generally use to, and having to memorize all of the different syntax can be challenging as well. Overall I'm very happy with my decision to take the class, and as of now do plan to take the next level of the class next semester.

So when we started our resume/portfolio assignment, I went on to CareerLink and started browsing the different internships that companies had posted on there. While I do have a good job, I think that having an internship in my field of interest would be extremely beneficial as well. After a few minutes of looking, I spotted a few that I would be extremely interested in. The first one is a Finance Co-Op with Bobcat company. This would be a great opportunity for me to get first-hand experience of what a career in corporate finance would be like. After researching the company a little bit, their values and mission really spoke to me, and I feel like it would make a great fit.

The second job posting that I saw was a summer internship with CoBank, which is a nationwide bank that mostly serves agricultural needs. This internship is for a credit analyst position, where I would get experience reviewing credit applications and writing summaries and reports to bring back to the managers.  This obviously would be a great move to further my career in the banking industry, and again the company sounds like a very solid one that I would enjoy working for.

I will probably end up actually applying for both, and see where the chips land.

So after about eight months of working in the call center, I was getting a little tired of it and wanted to find something different. I loved working at Gate City Bank though so I looked for job openings internally. There was a job opening in our Check Operations Department, which is part of the bigger Deposit Administrations department. The department as a whole does many different things, but as the name suggests all of the jobs are meant to support the Deposit part of the bank, which is all of the different accounts that customers can have, such as checking, savings, CDs, IRAs, etc.

Anyway, I applied for that job, had the interview, and switched over to that department at the beginning of January. Again, there was a lot of training for the job, but I was at least familiar with some of the programs that we used. In this new job, I have learned a lot more about how the front line tellers do their job and interact with them a lot more. I have also learned a lot more about some more complicated procedures of the bank involving electronic payments, stop payments, disputes, and things like that.

I am currently still working in this job and its become something that I really do enjoy. However, I am currently looking for other internships that I can do throughout my education, including the upcoming Spring and Summer. I'll talk a little bit about some of the jobs I am looking at next time.

This week I want to talk a little bit about my work experience at Gate City Bank.

I started working at Gate City in May of 2014, right at the end of my freshmen year of college. I was searching for jobs for the summer and potentially for the next school year, and given my major and my interests, I thought that a bank would be a perfect fit. I have lived in Fargo my whole life, and so I knew of Gate City and their good reputation throughout the community. I looked through their openings, and found one for the customer service center, aka the call center. The hours of the job fit nicely with my summer school schedule, and it seemed like something I would be good at, as well as a good entry level position into a bank for a college student.

So I ended up applying, and actually got a call back the very same day to set up an interview time. The interview went very well, and I started the job within the next two weeks and began my training. The job was actually a lot more complicated that I expected, as their was a lot of different information to learn, and every customer had the potential to ask you something that you didn't know. Overall though, it was a great job experience and I learned a lot about the bank and the industry as a whole.

I ended up moving to a different position within Gate City and the beginning of this year, and will talk about that next time.

After we got back from our trip, we were required to write a paper about the trip. The first half was to summarize and explain what we learned from each of the different business trips, and the second half was to be our own research on a topic that was related to business and/or culture in China.

I chose to do my research on something that really impacted me while I was there. You may or may not know that China's government censors a lot of different internet websites and phone applications. I knew this going in, but was pretty surprised as to the extent of the censorship. I was not able to access any google app on my phone, including the app store to download new apps. I couldn't access any American social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Without those things my phone was essentially useless. So I decided to write about how this affects both businesses and the day to day lives of the people living in China.

There are currently a couple widely accepted ideas of why the government censors as many things as it does. The first is to help Chinese companies grow and profit while limiting the growth of foreign companies into the Chinese market. The second is a little more subtle -  to monitor and select what exactly they want the public to know about. They are able to screen papers and stories that are put on the internet and printed in the newspapers, giving them a ton of control on what information the public has. The rise of social media has made this increasingly difficult, and the Chinese people have been demanding more and more information than they ever have before, putting the government in a very difficult position.

Overall I learned a lot about the business and culture in China, and had a lot of fun while doing it. 

So I'll talk a little more about my trip to China, what we did, and how I felt about it.

It started with a 15 hour flight, which were some of the longest hours of my life. After we finally landed and got outside of the airport, I realized I was in for a tough week. The five days that we were in Shanghai was one of the hottest weeks in its history, with a real feel temperature of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit most days. That was definitely one of the biggest changes that I had to adjust too.

Since the trip was being led as a business credit, we visited five companies that gave us presentations and did a Q&A. The companies were hdt Media, a solely Chinese based company, Abercrombie & Fitch, Emerson, SJE Rhombus, and Black & Veatch. The latter four were all American companies doing business in China and other parts of Asia. During the presentations they talked about how doing business differs from America, some of the advantages and disadvantages, and really cleared up a lot of misconceptions that many people have. For instance, I was under the impression that the Chinese government controlled and limited what a lot of companies could really do, but I found out that that was not really the case. The presenter of our hdt Media visit explained that as long as the company is doing business fairly and not trying to assert itself politically, the government really will not interfere in normal circumstances.

In addition to the presentations, some of the businesses had factories that we were able to tour. It might just be because these factories were in big cities and not out in the rural part of China, but from what I saw they were extremely organized, safe, and the workers seemed to be happy to be making money.

Overall it was an amazing visit and a great experience. Next I'll talk about some things we had to do for the class post-trip and a summary of my research paper.

So as I said, the next few posts I want to talk a little about my trip to China this summer, how it went, what I learned, my interest in the business culture, things like that.

For some reason that I can't really pinpoint, I've always been fascinated with the culture of the Asian countries, in particular with China. The year that I started high school, my school started to offer Chinese language class. I jumped on the opportunity and ended up taking that for four years. I learned more in that class about the culture than I did the actual language, and I knew from taking that class that one day I wanted to visit China.

When I got to college, I was extremely disappointed to learn that they didn't offer a Chinese class. I ended up not taking any language class, but still kept my interest and passion in the Chinese culture. So last year when a presenter came in to one of my business classes and talked about study abroad opportunities, I knew instantly that I wanted to do one in China. So that is exactly what I did. This summer, from August 3-16, I was in China on a faculty led study abroad trip. While we were there we did many things, among them visits of different businesses in China and seeing many cultural and historical sites. It was some of the best weeks of my life, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. 

So since that first experience with my grandma, over the next few years I started to save my own money and begin to invest it by myself. Honestly, it did not go that well. Because I was making so little, I didn't have a ton to invest. And because of this, the commission taken by the brokers for each trade I would make was a huge percentage of what I had. As a result, as time passed I ended up not really making any money and not really losing any money either. Eventually I just decided to get out of the market because I wasn't able to do much. Instead I just continually saved my money until I had enough to actually make some ground.

Fast forward a few years, to just a couple years ago actually, and I finally had what I thought would be enough to actually make some passive money. I did some research and decided to put some money into a mutual fund so that I didn't have to pay much attention to it. That was a few years ago now, and my money is still there. I have made a bit of money, but as I talked about before, the recent down turn has hurt me as well. I continue to pay attention to how the market is doing on a weekly basis, but I'm not overly concerned because the money I have invested is money that I don't need to rely on in the near future.

So next week I will go off this topic a bit and talk a bit about my recent visit to China and what I learned while I was there.

As I have said before, it was my grandmother who initially took me "under her wing" so to speak. She explained how the stock market worked in terms that I could understand at the time. She explained what exactly stocks were, how to buy and sell them, why to buy and sell them, the risks and rewards of buying/selling stocks, among many other things. After learning all of this stuff about it, I was really excited to get my feet wet.

My grandmother was very gracious and gave me some money to start, but on the condition that she had to help me choose my first investment. So we did a little bit of research together, and we bought about a thousand dollars worth of stocks. Over the next couple of days I tracked them religiously, checking the price every thirty minutes or so. Every time the price would go down I would get really scared that I would lose all of the money. And every time it went up I got really excited being able to see myself gain money from doing essentially nothing.

After a couple of weeks I got back together with my grandmother and we talked about a bit what happened, how I felt about it, and what I had learned from the experience. After that, to my sadness she sold the stocks and took her money back, leaving me with nothing. It was a great first experience however, and would give me good knowledge to lean back on in the future.

Hey everyone.

So if you have been following the stock market, or even just the daily news, you have undoubtedly heard some talk about whats been happening the last few weeks. After a few years of a steady increase in the value of the stock market, their has been a significant dip for the first time since 2008. One of the first days we saw a big dip was a few weeks ago when China decided to devalue its own currency. The US stock market reacted immediately, dropping a few percent in one day. The reason this is generally not good news is because it really hurts US companies, or any company from any other country other than China. US companies that make money in China must convert that money back into US dollars, and when the value of Chinese currency goes down it takes more of it to make 1 US dollar, lowering revenue and profits.

Because of that, the stock of US companies is devalued, and people start selling. Well it happened so fast that even after the stocks may have lost value equal to the lost profits, the momentum of people selling along with the amount of attention it was getting just kept it going down. This had some people extremely scared, while others had predicted a correction coming for awhile now. Since the initial drop, the market has been fluctuating quite a bit and has yet to settle back down. For those who have a lot of money in the market, this is a very stressful time indeed.

Later this week I will talk a bit more about the stock market and some of my first experiences with it!

Alright so to kind of wrap up the last couple of posts, I just want to talk a bit about my experience in the Economics and Finance classes here at NDSU. Starting with my very first semester of college, I have taken an economics class every single semester. This has kept my motivation going, while also allowing me to focus on other classes as well without spending all of my time thinking about economics. My experience in these classes has overall been a pretty positive one. I have learned quite a bit, developed good relationships with the teachers, and grown my interest in the area. This semester I am taking a course I have been waiting two years to take - Game Theory and Strategy. The basics of the class revolve around how people, or, more likely, businesses, strategically act and react to what other businesses do in their respective markets. Later on in the semester I will talk more about it.

After a semester or so I realized that since I came into college with a bunch of credits from AP classes, I had enough time in my four years to pick up another major. The logical choice based on my interests was, of course, finance. In order to do so, I had to take a few extra courses in order to be accepted into the college of business, but it was well worth it. For the last few semesters, I have taken  a couple business/finance courses each, and they have been very enjoyable. The finance courses have taught me how to better evaluate company's financials, how to evaluate stocks and bonds, among many other things. The finance and business courses required are extremely diverse, so I am very excited to continue taking these classes as well.

Overall I have been extremely lucky to receive such a good education only two years into my four year degree. All of my teachers have been very good and been willing to help out students to the best of their ability.

Next week I will talk about some more current events in the stock market and my thoughts about that!

Alright so, I've learned a bit of information about the stock market and the economy by now, and that has only made me more curious. So by the time that I got to high school I was really ready to take any class that would be able to teach me more about these things. Unfortunately for me, at my school the Economics and Government classes generally weren't taken until your senior year. I didn't let this discourage me though; I still paid close attention to current events, the economy, and the stock market, and how those things affected each other.

Finally. Finally it was my last year of high school, and I was able to take both Economics and Government classes. I realize that these classes don't sound very fun, and were often dreaded by students who had no interest in such things. For me though, I was beyond excited. And truly, they did not disappoint in the slightest. I ended up having the same teacher for both classes, and he was one of the best teachers I have ever had. Even with my eagerness for the classes and excitement to learn, somehow he was able to make me even more eager and more excited. The way that he taught fit perfectly with how I learn. The mixture of lecture, class interaction, group work, and homework was perfect. On top of that, I was able to establish a good personal relationship with him, which made the classes even more enjoyable.

What I learned from that Economics obviously influenced me enough to continue the course of study in college and hopefully throughout my professional career. All in all, these topics are something that I thoroughly enjoy, and I consider myself lucky to have found something so early in my life that I can pursue.