If the curriculumn for our class only included today's conversations and experiences with AECOM, personal interviews & meetings with the university students, it would have been worth it. I don't think I could've learned so much about global engineering & China anywhere else in the world. You really need to travel and experience this new culture and environment firsthand, words do cannot do it justice.

The first half of our day consisted of a long, but very inspirng meeting at AECOM. In fact, it was so inspiring that it kind of made me regret not being an Civil Engineer. The two speakers from AECOM were both senior VP's and were both involved in some important projects, both domestically in China and internationally for other AECOM business matters. That's really amazing, considering that one of the guest speaker was a woman. Dr. Li was truly a pioneer of her time, raising concerns about sustainability and enviornment policies, while also being na advocate for new technologies such as the BIM program that every company is now starting to adopt. She has been my favorite speaker because her passion for her field and love for engineering really shined through in her presentation. I really liked hearing that engineering is more than just the technical work, it is important to remember that in order to separate yourself as a truly great engineer, is to be able to understand the entire system. You must approach an engineering project from a holistic point of view, and cannot take no for an answer. When she had really strict clients who didn't like one of their solutions, she preservered through and come up with truly innovative solutions to problems with tight constraints. I loved hearing how proud she is of all of her accomplishments and yet she was still really humble. She did not make us feel like she was superior today even though her card had three rows of qualifications and degrees. Instead of using those qualifications to intimidate us and remind us of how far away she is from us, she used it to inspire and remind us that learning doesn't stop at school. If you are really interested in something, it's never too late to learn it.

Another notable experience I had today was going to the bike lock meeting at Giant. I was surprised at how much the Bike shop knew of the market for bike locks, and how they were being manufacturered. We asked a lot of quesitons, some of which were risky and personal to the bike shop, but the interviewee took his time to answer every question to the best of his ability. Based off of the responses, we've deciced to pivot our idea a bit. You won't hear about it much in this blog post because we have to refine it a bit but keep posted for when we present about our findings in class.

The final experience that I would like to talk about is the conversation I had with the university student on our ride to his university from our interview. The cab ride was an hour long, so we had a lot of time to get acquantined to each other and both asked frank questions about each other's culture and government. He asked me a questions that I was really surprised to hear because it showed just how well he knew our government system work. He asked me, that although all 50 states were ruled by one central government, each state was allowed to have its own set of rules, does that still make us feel like we are one united nation or does it more feel like we are a collection of separate states. It was an interesting question because I had never really thought about it before. I answered it in the best way I understood how our government work and explained that the US land mass is almost the equivalent of China but has less than 1/4 of the population. This leads people to span across the entire country in small populations relative to China. However, this also means that because people are so spread apart, people's views and values from one region will differ from another. States make it possible for people who agree with one thing to congregate together and made sure their interest are being head, whereas someone else with different views can be in a state where their views are being represented properly. The federal government sets general guidelines that states can then refine to best match what works for their area. I'm not sure if this is the right answer but I suspect it doesn't feel too far from the truth.

I asked him what were his impressions of US people and whether or not they liked us considering our governments have really differing views. He said that the general concensus really love Americans and there really aren't any hard feelings towards our people.