Thursday, 30 August 2012
Six weeks at UWA provided 18 undergraduate students from China with much more than just a research training program.
Food and the differences between China's and Australia's eating habits were high on the agenda for most of the students.
"In Australia, most people eat quite a lot at dinner time, at night, but not so much for breakfast or lunch," said Cheng Zhang, a physics student from the University of Science and Technology, China (USTC). "In China, we eat a lot at every meal. I think we don't get fat because we don't eat cheese."
Bangrui Chen, a mathematics major from Nanjing University, said he was surprised to eat fish without bones. "At home, we always eat whole fish with the bones in but now I love the idea of a fish fillet," he said.
Both students remarked on the amount of coffee drunk by Australians. "In China, people mainly drink water. The quality of the tap water is not good, but bottled water is so cheap, say five or six bottles for a dollar. And if people want a hot drink, they drink hot water rather than coffee or even tea," Cheng said. Both the students, who are in the final year of their undergraduate degrees, said they wished their English vocabulary included the words for all the foods and sauces they had tried in Perth. "When we go to a restaurant, I just point at what I want," Bangrui said.
Cheng and Bangrui were part of a group of high achieving science students who took part in the third year of an educational exchange program developed and run by Dr Judy Berman, Principal Adviser, International Research Networks.
She came up with the idea of the internship program while using an Endeavour Executive Award to look at increasing research linkages with China.
Five students from USTC came to UWA and worked with scientists and postgraduate student mentors in 2010. The number has now increased to 18 and this year included four science students from Nanjing.
The program has increased interest from these universities in UWA for postgraduate positions and collaborative research.
During their stay, the students spent an afternoon with UWA BPhil (Honours) undergraduates, exchanging information about their degrees, sharing career expectations and study abroad experiences, and comparing differences between Australian and Chinese laboratory work. They also went to Rottnest and stayed overnight at the Gingin observatory.
Bangrui worked with Professor Kevin Judd and Assistant Professor Thomas Stemler in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Cheng and another USTC student worked on two projects with Winthrop Professor Dongke Zhang in the UWA Centre for Energy.
"Our first project Sustainability in a Jungle , was very much like a fantasy story," said Cheng. "Our job was to find the balanced population of each species in the jungle and the sustainability of the jungle ecosystem. Dongke designed it like a children's story with rabbits, foxes and ‘dongkes' in the Sherwood Jungle. It made it a lot of fun," he said.
In their second project, Agglomeration of two particles with molten ash coating , the students had to find or build a model for two ash particles colliding with each other. "We had to examine in which conditions the two ash particles would stick together and in which conditions they would go their separate ways after the collision. Insight into the ash agglomeration mechanism can help to burn coal more efficiently," Cheng said.
Bangrui's mathematics project was Stochastic Modelling of Long-term Climate Variability .
"We investigated simple two-dimensional models of climate variability to explain the climate behaviour over the past five million years. Models should provide at least the qualitative explanation for amplitude variations and time asymmetry in each of the climate periods."
Published in UWA News , 3 September 2012
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