Seeking what drives me

I have thought a lot about my vocation and what it is exactly that I want to do with my life. For 18 years I had my father pushing me to become an engineer like him because that was the smart path where you can see progress in your field and make enough of a salary to support a family and be happy. I would graduate from high school, go to college for 4 years at the University of Maryland as a legacy of engineers, and then grad school for engineering. How let down my father was when I decided to not go to college right away and instead volunteer a year with the Presbyterian Church. The program I worked for constantly pushed our vocations. Giving us a chance to put life on pause and serve the communities we were placed in for a year. I was placed in New Orleans and as an 18 year old fresh out of high school I learned more about the world than a class room could have ever taught me. I learned that I didn't want to be an engineer, that I didn't really have any sort of desire to have a family, that as big of a fan I still am of Maryland (go terps!!) I didn't really want to go there for college, and most importantly I saw what happens when a city is absolutely devastated by a storm and the effect that non-profits can have on that city, both negative and positive. My vocation was primarily derived from the negative though. I saw how badly a community can suffer when a non-profit that did everything for that city suddenly pulls out for various reasons and that area is just as bad as it was when the non-profit first started working there because there is no structure for that community to fall back on. Because of this I became inspired to go to school for International Business and learn how to start a non-profit that works towards making small businesses and local entrepreneurs more self-sufficient. Following the "teach a man to fish" concept I hope to financially advise small businesses to be able to run at their peak efficiency, so instead of relying on a non-profit to do everything communities can begin to rely on themselves more, employing the community and overall bettering the quality of life for that nation.

So onto how this relates to my site placement. China is an economic power house. I'm going to be taking international business management, corporate finance, mandarin, Chinese culture, and classes on how businesses are run in the Chinese concept. I'm also going to be living in a huge city that will mostly have large businesses, but a city that is also a transportation hub. I hope while I am in Nanchang to be able to go to some of the more rural regions of China and through observation examine and analyze the daily practices of a small business in that region. I hope that between the classes I will be taking and the observation in these rural communities that I will be able to have a comparison between the business practices and see what kinds of practices those small businesses could use.