BMHS Seniors Attend First Lady Speech on Chinese Studies

Below is story I wrote about a Brien McMahon senior who attended a China Study Abroad Forum in DC where Michelle Obama gave the keynote address.  Here is a stat from the 100,000 Strong Initiative website that I thought interesting:  Ten times more Chinese students come to the United States for educational programs than Americans who study in China, and 600 times more Chinese study the English language than Americans study Mandarin.  


A version of this story appears on TheDailyNorwalk.com

Michelle Obama hopes that there will be more students in the U.S. like Brien McMahon's Sakthi Ramesh. Last week, Ramesh travelled to Washington D.C. to listen to the First Lady encourage young people to study abroad in China. Ramesh, who studies Mandarin at McMahon's Center for Global Studies, has already visited China once as a sophomore and plans to go again this spring for two weeks.


Ramesh, along with a fellow CGS student Hana Glasberg, attended the China Study Abroad Forum at Howard University on Wednesday. The event was part of Obama Administration’s “100,000 Strong” initiative, which aims to increase and diversify the number of American students studying in China. The Brien McMahon students were among 1,000 other students at Obama’s talk which coincided with the Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the United States last week.

“I came away from the event really excited about the opportunity to visit China again and live daily life as the Chinese do,” says Ramesh who was asked by her Mandarin teacher if she would be interested in attending the event. “Michelle Obama said two things that impressed me during the speech. She said that youth play a vital role in Chinese-American relations. She also said that when she and the President go abroad, they don’t only visit parliament buildings and palaces, they visit schools.”

Ramesh says she and Glasberg tried to meet the First Lady, but “security was very tight”.

Ramesh’s interest in China stems from the country’s importance on the global scene, but it’s also personal. She was born in Singapore, where there is a large Chinese population. “I want to retrace my Singaporean roots,” she says. Ramesh moved to Norwalk in sixth grade and has been studying Mandarin since.

In college, Ramesh plans to major in environmental studies and minor in Chinese. “ “My plan is to enforce environmental policies in China.”