Eric's Beijing Diary

I was parking my bike in Wudaokou this evening when a group of young ladies came up to me and asked me if they could interview me. We went into KFC and sat down for a few minutes. They were students in a class at Qinghua University, and they had an assignment to interview a foreigner about what it is like for a foreigner to get used to China. But they also had lots of questions for me about life in other places. They were all making preparations to study in Canada, so they asked me if I knew anything about it. I told them that I had gone to graduate school in Canada. I hesitate to be too hard and fast in making comparisons between graduate education in Canada and that in other countries such as the U.S. and Australia, because I graduated from the University of Regina in 1986, which is (my goodness!) twenty years ago now. But I think I can still be safe in generalizing that you can get the same or better education for less money in Canada than in the United States. It was definitely true in my case. The program I went through at the University of Regina was significantly better than what I could have gotten in North Dakota, and for quite a bit less money than it would have cost me if I had stayed home.