Towards the end of my teaching contract in Japan, I was thinking seriously about my next step. Did I want to go back to the U.S. and apply for jobs/internships/grad school or attempt to live in another foreign country? I've mentioned this before, but my interest in my heritage peaked while I was in Japan, as did my desire to study the language of my parents' home country. I initially wanted to study Cantonese and retain my childhood fluency, but as most academic centers do not teach Cantonese, I realized that this would be hard to do (and Mandarin is undeniably more useful).
At the same time, I had just gotten back from visiting friends in Taiwan and had loved many things about it, including the food, the environment and the ease with which people interacted with one another. Though I had a great time in Japan and wouldn't trade that experience for anything, Taiwan felt pretty different to me - less grounded in rigid customs and, in many ways, more international. And of course, everyone spoke Mandarin there.
So it was really great timing when I happened to stumble across this article while still in Japan, about getting paid to study Mandarin in Taiwan. It seemed like the perfect fit for what I wanted to do next: be a student again while still managing to live in a foreign country (I suppose I wasn't quite ready to return to the States permanently yet).
Initially, finding out where to apply was tricky. The Huayu scholarship is basically open to anyone without Taiwanese citizenship and who is not an overseas Chinese student, but to apply you must find the nearest embassy in your country of residence. For me, this was San Francisco. Though the Huayu scholarship application is supposed to be released in January, I don't think SF's website had it up until the beginning of February. The deadline is always at the end of March, but it is recommended that you send in the application package as soon as possible for a higher chance of getting accepted.
Putting the application together was a little bit tougher for me since most of my contacts were located overseas. I had to make sure to mail in the application early enough so that it would reach San Francisco (from Japan) long before the deadline. Filling out the application and writing the study plan (essentially the statement of purpose) didn't take me that long, but I also had to secure two letters of recommendation. For one of them, I asked my boss in Japan, who graciously wrote me one almost immediately after I put in the request. For the second, I asked one of my professors from UCLA; however, since I wasn't living in California, I asked that she please mail the recommendation to my residence in Japan so that I could assemble all the materials myself. (It is also recommended that you send everything in one package, to minimize the chances of something getting lost in the mail.)
The application also asked for a formal, stamped copy of my university transcripts, which I had to order online. However, when the transcripts had yet to arrive to Japan after one week, I called the registrar office and they told me that international postage can often take as long as 2 weeks to arrive, if you don't pay for the expedited service (which I didn't, since I thought I had ordered them early enough). As a courtesy, they told me they could send me another copy, free of charge, to my home address in the States, which I could then have someone forward to me using a faster mailing option. I eventually asked my dad to do so.
Obviously, the whole process would have been a lot less stressful and cheaper had I applied back in California (I wouldn't have had to pay for international postage, for one), but since I wouldn't be returning home until April, this wasn't really an option. Another unexpected obstacle I ran into was not having a printer in my Japanese apartment. At first, I decided that the best option was to use an internet cafe nearby, which offers printing charged by the page. This became somewhat of an ordeal due to various reasons, but fortunately, I managed to print everything out after several failed attempts.
Some tips on the application:
1. Give serious thought to your letters of recommendation. I can't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure they play a pretty significant role in the selection. The way I saw it, the scholarship committee (whoever that might be) would definitely want to pick candidates who a) would likely finish out their term in Taiwan without incident and b) had academic qualifications that proved they could take their Chinese studies seriously.
This doesn't mean you have to be good at Chinese or even know any Chinese to apply (this matters for the other scholarships, but not Huayu).
Essentially, they want someone who can live abroad for an extended period of time and who has a strong background in academia. Since I had already spent well over a year living and working in Japan, I figured that asking someone from my job would show that I could successfully live in a foreign country and carry out my responsibilities diligently. As for the academic part, I have a feeling that graduating from UCLA with a fairly high GPA carried some weight, as did asking someone who could extensively assess my abilities in the classroom (I ended up asking a professor in the film department, whose class I had absolutely loved and did pretty well in).
2. Make sure your "study plan" is amazingly thorough and personal. When I first read the "study plan" part, which stated, "Please describe your study plan in Taiwan in __ number of words," I was initially confused. Did they mean how much I was planning to study once I got to Taiwan or the means by which I would be studying? It seemed strangely worded, to say the least. However, after doing some googling, I realized that they were really just asking for a statement of purpose. Why Taiwan? Why Mandarin? How does this apply for your future plans and how are you planning to implement these goals during your time there?
One of the reasons why this scholarship exists is to promote international exchange among citizens of countries with diplomatic ties to Taiwan. It's important to focus in your essay on why you picked Taiwan specifically, as opposed to other countries where you can also learn Mandarin (China, for example). So showing in your essays that you have some political knowledge about Taiwan is very important, as well as explaining how that knowledge relates to your academic and career goals.
Since this is the only part of the application where your personal agenda can really shine, it's important to spend a lot of time on it and have someone (or many people) read it over and offer critiques. They want to make sure they're not giving the scholarship to someone who just wants free money to spend in a foreign country.
3. Stay in touch with your embassy and the language center that you're planning to study at. For those interested in learning Mandarin in Taiwan, there are a lot of language centers you can choose from. Initially I was debating on whether to study in Kaohsiung or Taipei. I didn't want to be in a big city, but most of the major language centers are located in the more densely populated areas of Taiwan (obviously). You have to pick your language center before you apply and request a letter of acceptance to submit with your application. This isn't hard to do, but it does involve choosing a place early on and keeping in touch with them throughout the application process (think: lots of paperwork).
I ultimately decided on NCCU because 1) it was located in Taipei, but in a more rural, scenic area than most of the major language centers downtown, 2) it got lots of positive reviews online, 3) it was about the same price as the language center I was looking at in Kaohsiung, where I initially wanted to go because living expenses would presumably be cheaper than in Taipei. However, I knew that Kaohsiung had worse humidity than Taipei, and that was the ultimate deal-breaker for me.
I'm glad I made the choice to go to NCCU because it's an incredibly international school (with some of the best English programs in any Taiwan university, though that doesn't really affect me as a language student) and they seem very organized in all their dealings with international students. For example, the woman in charge of admissions to the language center always responded immediately to my e-mails and was very straightforward in informing me of the paperwork she needed to complete the application process. She was also really warm, friendly and easy to communicate with. In fact, I was significantly more impressed by my dealings with NCCU than with the experience I had at the embassy in San Francisco (getting a visa was probably one of the most exasperating parts of the whole experience).
And though I didn't know this at the time, it doesn't seem like there are that many Americans studying at NCCU's Chinese Language Center. Most of the people I've met are from somewhere else in Asia (mainly Korea and Japan), Europe or Latin America. It's great because it definitely feels like one big melting pot where you're meeting people from all over the world - and as a bonus, it's very easy to find exchange partners when your primary language is English (still the lingua franca of the developed world).
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