Please Introduce yourself!
Hello, I’m Joyce Gao! I’m a sophomore student in Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and I am studying communication studies.
Let me briefly explain about communication studies. It’s a discipline to equip us with skills to work in the media industry. Some popular career paths include journalism, public relations (PR), advertising, broadcasting and film, research and policy and information analytics.
I hope to work in data analytics and hence, I will specialize in information analytics. On the other hand, I am keen to learn more about public relations. The good thing is that these two specializations has very similar subjects in my school, so I still have some time to explore my options and ultimately make a decision.
The first time that I found about ISC was March, when I was planning my upcoming summer holidays. I have always dreamed of going overseas to attend an international conference, to be with the youth from other countries. I just googled the keywords “international student conference” and ISC64’s website was the one I settled on. I read there about that and thought “Okay sure, let’s go for this one!!”
What do you think about your about topic？
My table is Table 6, on human rights and international law. People’s impression of human rights tends to be “It’s just human rights, it’s so simple, just to make sure that everyone is getting enough education or other things.” However the question arises, “How are you going to do it?” It’s a really complicated problem. There are lots of political issues at stake. There are several cases of parties using human rights to achieve political goals or use human rights as a cheap disguise for ulterior motives. Take Donald Trump for example. He causes children of migrant parents to suffer in really horrible conditions to advance his agendas. Meanwhile, the entire world is angry at the US right now. Human rights is only going to be abused more as a political tool. I believe that there must be something we can do as a youth, in order to stop this terrible occasion or at least alleviate it.
I have experience of joining conferences. I have joined a conference in Singapore, where I discussed about gender equality. Unlike ISC, we did not present our proposed solution to formal organization. Therefore, I am looking forward to this amazing opportunity in ISC, where we can seriously pursue the solution to the problem, and actually propose it to society. This is definitely something I ‘ve never experienced before.
Not related to my table, but my second goal would be to learn to communicate with people of different cultural backgrounds, since cultural intelligence is becoming pivotal. The conference I joined was a Singaporean dominated one, so ISC is actually be my first time to join a conference not as a native. In addition, I love to learn more about other countries! I will definitely have the chance during the program. From what I can see, there are so many participants coming from many different countries!
