china: day one

It has been raining since we arrived in Xi'an, so Dr. Li decided to forgo the campus tour. Instead, we spent time getting situated in our dorm rooms and buying things from the local Wal-Mart. It was an extraordinary experience. Wal-Mart here is for rich people; the prices on average are much higher than they are in other stores, even though they're lower than they are in the United States. Imported items and electronics still cost about the same; the extra shirts I bought were ironically the most expensive items in my cart.

In the evening, our class met with a group of Xi'an Jiaotong University students. I had a fascinating conversation with a senior software engineering major. He said that software engineering degrees are not common--formal education for the discipline is new, just as it is in the States. The way XJTU goes about teaching it is very different from UNL's approach, however. My software engineering education involved design patterns, testing techniques, and software project management methods. The program at Xi'an involves "C, C++, Java, and some newer things like AJAX, ASP.NET, and C#. You know C#? We also take some computer science courses, like operating systems and SQL." There's no project management in the curriculum, as far as I can tell. They're learning how to use the tools, but not which ones to use or why to use them. To borrow a phrase from Matthew Mengerink, it sounds like software engineering students at XJTU are majoring in shovel.