Building a platform for the future

Soy Sauce talks with Wei Jia about her take on life and study in Melbourne. Wei Jia has lived here for over two years now and I have had the pleasure of meeting with her on several occasions as she was a classmate of my girlfriends at Melbourne University.

My name is Wei Jia and I come from Guangzhou. I arrived in Australia in late 2006. At the time I had just graduated from University and hadn’t any work experience. As for why I chose to come to Melbourne, to be honest it wasn’t my first choice. I was more inclined to work for a couple of years in China and then go to America but my family were more familiar with things here which made it easier I guess.

Students from China leave home to pursue advanced studies for lots of reasons but I think the three most important ones include the desire to study more things which gives them greater opportunities for the future. Immigration is also a popular reason along with dodging the pressures of sitting either the national university entrance examination or the exams for entering a graduate programme. As for those students from China who don’t come overseas, I believe their reasons would be things like a lack of funds, or they think China is fine. Many probably plan to accumulate some more work experience in China before looking for opportunities to go abroad.

On the whole I don’t really believe that Chinese overseas students are happy with the study environment in Melbourne for the simple fact that there are just too many Chinese people here!