Free passport
to live and work in China

By Jeff Frankel

Rider students will have the opportunity to travel to China this summer to tutor English and teach American culture to high school aged children, a school administrator said.

Tutors will receive room and board and a stipend during the month long “summer camp” between July 15, and Aug. 15, 2006, at the No. 1 Boarding School in Fuzhou, China. However, “the summer camp is not sitting around a fire,” said Jamie O’Hara, Vice President of Enrollment Management.

“Basically, it allows the student to live in China for four and a half weeks, live on campus at one of the boarding schools in Fuzhou, China,” said O’Hara. “They would work 30 hours per week as conversational partners with high school students. It’s very similar to a summer camp that you would see at some of the boarding schools here in the states.”

It would be a great experience to go over and tutor, especially for students interested in going into a global career, he said.

“If you’re thinking about an international career, an experience of living for a month, in a summer environment, where you’re working in a job overseas, it gives you a great opportunity to leverage that for a future career,” he said.

However, this would also be a good for any major on campus because the world is coming more globalized, said Dr. Anne Osborne, chairperson of the History Department, who is also involved with the project.

“I think it would be good for business students, but I think that we all live in an interconnected world,” she said. “[It is good] if you’re a teacher, working in government, [or] if you’re interested in literature or the arts. It would be valuable for all students.”

Students who have already taken classes involving China or its history will be given first priority, but it will not be mandatory for students to have taken those classes, O’Hara said.

“We’re going to make sure that the students representing Rider are good ambassadors and comfortable living in an overseas environment,” he said. “The student that has had a Chinese History course or has an interest in China is probably going to be more likely to be the student we send. But we don’t have many students who have had Chinese classes, either language or history, so it could still be open and flexible.”

The trip will prove to be a way for students to travel to China and work with students, Osborne said. They will be able to experience the country without doing the “tourist things.”

“This will offer our students an opportunity that they would not get at any comparable institution,” Osborne said. “The opportunity to go to China, to make friends, to interact on a person-to-person basis to people is an extraordinary opportunity.”

The Fuzhou school will pay for most expenses except airfare, which the tutors will have to pay for themselves, O’Hara said.

“The partnership that we are creating with this institution [will] pay for it,” he said. “They pay for the room and board and give money to our students and pay them for doing this job. The student will pay for their own $1,000 airfare.”

An information session will be held on Monday, March 6, at 4:30 p.m., in Memorial Hall Room 318.