Last Friday, students from all three universities gathered in PKU’s Moot Court for the annual Speed Tutoring event hosted by the English Association and the International Students Association. This event seeks to put those seeking language exchange partners in contact with another, though students still have the option to be blindly paired with someone later on.
Before the event officially started at 7pm, the room was already more than half filled. Each table had a mix of international and Chinese students and they were all engaged in conversation while snacking on the drinks and snacks provided by the EA. Soon after, two hosts from the EA and IA, Li Rui and Hamza Ayub respectively, welcomed everyone and started the event in a lively manner. The first round of activities began following a brief introduction of the organizing associations.
Topics such as dating, internet celebrities, and which country would you prefer to be born in set Moot Court into a sea of chatter as everyone began excitedly. After each topic, international students from each table would move on to the next one. May, a first year international graduate student from PHBS, liked the rotation part because it “makes us know more friends”. The second round of activities was a dubbing game, where participants dubbed a scene from movies such as Zootopia and The Titanic.
The annual Speed Tutoring event is one of the few chances that students from the entire University Town can come together and make friends with each other. Many students walked away with new friends and knowledge about other cultures. The event ended only too soon, as everyone became busy exchanging their Wechat IDs. Qiu Rui, a first year graduate student at HIT, really enjoyed attending the event as he “met a lot of new friends from different countries, and also got to practice his oral English”. He hopes for more collaborative events like this to bring all three universities together. Indeed, such a well-attended event shows the potential of future collaborations between the three universities.
Reported by Yang Wandong
Photos by Wang Huimin, Qin Jie, Cheng Ming
Edited by Megan Mancenido
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