伟易博

杜兰大学交流报告

暴嘉伟 2015级本科生

Window to world, window to heart

I have spent the whole fall semester in Tulane, located in New Orleans. It was my first time to be aboard, with a lot of excitement and tension, and finally, I arrived Tulane in August.

If asked to choose a country most similar to China, I will choose USA. At the first sight of New Orleans, I couldn’t believe that I have really put my feet on a foreign land, despite disparate scene. People view the world in the same way. From the things we regard as momentous, to how we treat others, everything is the same, which I believed even more in the following 4 months, as more people I had dealt with and more places I have had been to.

Being an exchange student is totally different from simply paying a visit. Obviously, it is already one of the best way to experience a culture.

Thousands of lovely two-floor houses and net-like narrow streets with towering trees in their two flanks, make the uptown a dream place to spend your vacation.

I bet most of Chinese people will never consider it as a place to spend their life, instead it is only a taste of a quiet and easy life. I am not an exception. However, maybe it was already the right time for me to take a small break to free myself from hard loads and tight schedules, and find out what I really want and desire to seek for it lifelong time. To a certain degree, nowhere is better than New Orleans for me to have a four-month break.

I have to say, what I want is not merely the easy life and good grades, but to get touch with my heart, and become aware of what I really want, which is the lesson that man must go over.

I have to say a little bit more about New Orleans, the city I lived in before carrying on to another topic, since it will be extremely interesting to trace the time back, and image what have happened before my arrival. The city stands there for over 200 years, having been influence by French, Mexican, Indian and, of course, English cultures. NOLA is more than a mixture of these cultures, but just like the wine, they collapsed and fermented. Whether architectures or tombs, whether daytime or night, whatever the downtown or the uptown, people have been, are and will be living there and making their marks.

Night belongs to the French Corner, which is the major attraction for the tourists, acting as the symbol of the old French days. Casinos and bars lighten the night, and in the square nearby, thousands of people gather to the live rock show. It seems that the city falls in zealot and is preparing to burn everyone out. Dance and wine are the theme of these wonderful nights.

However, I can’t get myself involved, or even touched by their enthusiasm. The other side of the building appeals me a bit more. Standing solely at the river-side walk, facing the Mississippi, I realized that I was standing in the middle of culture. The sound of river, the noise from the crowd, trapped me into deep thought. I even want to bury myself in the water, and listen to the sound of the waves, and the flow of sand. At the bottom of my heart, I eager to know how the river flow across the whole America and breed the people who lives here for millions of years. I was convinced that the answer is at the bottom of these river, buried by the mud and sand, and it was time for me to find it out.

Through the darkness, I can see a huge bridge in distance crossing the river, twinkle lights shining from both itself and its reflection in the river.

Culture is not an abstract concept to me any more at that time, instead, I can touch it in the form of wind; I can see it in the form of light; I can smell it in the form of odor……

At that time, New Orleans was just like treasure absorbing all my thoughts. If asked to describe the city, “spectacular” is just fine.

Getting back to my academic life, most of my time are spent in the uptown. The Uptown Campus is the main campus of Tulane. For all of undergraduate whatever department they are in, they spend most of their time in it.

It is a very nice and clean campus. People there are in hurried paces. The staff in International Office for Scholars and Students are very kind and helpful. I really appreciate their work, because I can get immediate reply in the daytime when I email them, without whose help I couldn’t enroll in the courses smoothly.

I selected 5 courses in total. They are Intro to Machine Learning, Linear Models, Stochastic Process, Analysis of Fixed Income Equity and Financial Models. And I audited the Probability Theory, which is only open for the graduates.

Among all these courses, my favorite one is the Stochastic Process. It is quite different from Stochastic Analysis in GSM. And this course attached a lot of attention to application, especially use the R, which is a widely used software for statistic. The professor is so kind that another Chinese student and I often debated in the class. We came up with different solutions, and let our professor to make a judgement whose was better.

And I also learned a lot in the Intro to Machine Learning class. From Bayesian Model to RNN model, I as a business student, became interested in this field. I could even do a project to predict the stock price using LSTM model, which is really full of sense of achievement.

As for Financial Modeling, the professor taught us how to use Python and its packages. Python is one of the best languages in data analysis. Pandas and Numpy provide us all kinds of tools to find the pattern. I spent hours on the final project, and it totally paid off: the professor was really impressed on it, and promised he would write a recommend letter for me when I graduate.