Selfie with me and Jennifer.

Here I am as Mr. Bing arriving “fashionly-late” to his first foreign class at AUPP! Although I still have jet lag and only have three-four hours of sleep, my mind is mentally prepared and excited to experience a whole new level in Dr. Chigas class. The moment when Dr. Chigas told me to introduced myself, I immediately was waving my arms up to the sky and shouting “woot woot, da name’s BING” right before class was about to start. Everyone chuckled and laughed! Dr. Chigas sarcastically said, “We all learned that Bing is the shyest person in class.” In the beginning of class, I sat next to my arranged group members. My group members name were Sievlan (Sue-LONG) and Nicole. Now, according to my friends, these AUPP students’ intellectual levels are absolutely amazing! They said they spoke English fairly-welled as if they were a native to the language. Some of my friends said that their English is better than ours.  When I was discussing with Sievlan and Nicole during group discussion, I was surprised of their vocabulary levels. We were tossing big words back and forward, and I felt comfortable as I maintained the conversation with them. But sometime, I got caught up speaking too fast and they couldn’t understand me. During group discussion, it took me a while to understand what our research study is all about.  Our topic question is, “How accurate is Cambodian Youths’ perception on job availability?” One out of the five UMASS students, I’m the only UMASS student in our class who is not a Psychology major. I’m an English major, so this is a whole new level for me in tackling this assignment. During our group discussion, we were generating questionnaires and used them to interview Cambodian Youths from non-profit organizations and also from a secondary or post-secondary educational background. Once we have everything setup, it was time for our group to interview Cambodian Youths from two separated non-profit organization. For me personally, I have a difficult time interviewing Cambodian Youths from the Cambodian Indigenous Youth Association because of the language barrier. Since my Khmer is in elementary level, I have to ask my group members to translate for me during the interview. Even though they know some basic level of English, I feel like I made them nervous from my American accent.  It’s interesting to interview the indigenous Cambodian Youths, because they came from a strong authentic background. Nonetheless, I am able to interview some of the youth from Khmer and Youth Social Development. They speak fairly good English, but I have to be careful of the vocabulary I’m using. Sometime, I have to ask my group member again to translate for me in Khmer to English. Despite of the language barrier, I am very amazed in hearing the passionate voice coming out from the Cambodian Youths during the interview. Seeing into their eyes, they really dedicated their time in being educated and tackling new things in life. I see their virtues in saving their community and becoming the next generation in Cambodia.  I glad I took the opportunity in speaking with them. Overall, I learned a lot from my first day of class despite of my jet lag, lack of sleep, and all the classes I missed out. Here are the photos I took with my DSLR camera. These photos are the scene taking place during the class interview with the Cambodian Youth. Hope you all like it.