I enjoy the familiar shock on locals’ faces at seeing the Chinese language flow from the lips of a fair, redheaded laowai (term for foreigner). For them, meeting me, an American learning Chinese, is further reassurance that their country is heading into modernity. With some exceptions, most urban Chinese are excited to see their culture expanding beyond their once impermeable borders.

The peculiarities of Chinese modernization shaped my study abroad experience in both Shanghai and Beijing. In the largest Chinese city, Shanghai, where I spent the summer after my sophomore year, modernity is in full force. However, in Beijing, behind shiny façades it is not uncommon to see lingering hutongs, where laundry hangs, woks are fired up on the sidewalk, and western toilets are nowhere to be found.

I spent the summer after my freshman year in Beijing on the Columbia Beijing Language Program. Since I had taken only one year of Chinese, I had little familiarity with the culture or the language. CIB (as it is affectionately called) seemed to anticipate the anxieties of second-year level students. The characters in our textbook were also studying abroad in Beijing, encountering the chatty cab drivers and disappearing hutongs.

Attempting to cover two semesters of Chinese in 8 weeks, CIB has the reputation of being a language boot camp. Every morning there are four hours of classes followed by one-on-one tutorials in the afternoon. Although grueling, the summer put me and other CIB students in a comfortable position to enter third-year Chinese in the fall.

Academics aside, daily interaction with the culture and the people of Beijing are what I remember best about my CIB experience. Even today, words like siji (taxi cab driver) and taojiahuanjia (to bargain) bring back moments from that first summer when I experienced the true meanings of my vocabulary words.

Columbia also offers the Summer Business Chinese and Internship Program in Shanghai for those entering third-year or fourth-year Chinese. The Shanghai program consists of a six-week language program and a four-week internship at a Chinese company.

The Chinese classes in this program introduce new vocabulary and grammar and, in the fourth-year level specifically, the focus is on reading as opposed to speaking. After the marathon of Chinese-learning the previous summer, many returning students found the Shanghai language program much less demanding. By the end of the six weeks, it was hard to tell if my classmates or I had really made any progress academically.

The internships began at the end of July. Internships ranged from art galleries to steel corporations. Although an intimidating atmosphere at first, it was a great place to interact with co-workers and practice Chinese as well as gain insight into the Chinese workplace.

The program sends a coordinator to work with students at each company. As a result, the experience was less daunting than expected.

By the end of the summer in Shanghai, I saw a side of China that I had not seen the summer before in Beijing. I felt I understood the force of this emerging world power and its hard-working and determined population.

The programs provide different views into this perplexing nation. While the Beijing program boosted my language performance, the Shanghai program transformed my understanding of the Chinese workplace and the position of foreigners within that environment. A study of Chinese is incomplete without either one of these lessons.