Pre-trip Projections

USP is committed to providing us with opportunities to go beyond our own major programs where we get to meet and experience new things from a different perspective. For one, USP scholars are very diverse in background with people of many different faculties and schools in NTU. This allows me to listen to and consider the view of different people who would look at a problem differently from how I see it.

One example would be concerning my group’s research topic on nutrition literacy. Being a public policy and global affairs major, I tend to see nutrition literacy as an issue concerning government regulation and consider the impact that policy-making has on all people. Thus, my opinion on the solution to the problem would revolve around how the government can make changes in their policy in order to improve or change nutrition literacy in their country. However, because of the diverse academic backgrounds of my group mates, someone else from the business school would consider it from a marketing perspective while a sociology major would consider it a social issue that is deeply rooted in culture and traditional attitude towards food and nutrition.

Therefore, the TOPS program definitely helps to develop me in a holistic manner where I learn to make use of cross-disciplinary learning in order to tackle the problem identified in my research topic. A skill that exemplifies what USP is about and what USP aims to inculcate in me as a USP scholar. Such a skill will no doubt be meaningful to me as a freshman where I will definitely be faced with obstacles that are multi-faceted in nature that need to dealt with from different academic areas. Furthermore, this experience also teaches me to appreciate the different opinions and perspectives of my fellow peers where I learn to understand their point of view on the research topic.

Another aspect of TOPS is that it challenges us to look at human aspect of the problems identified in our research topic. By being able to go on the ground to find out more about the people in Chiang Mai through the surveys and interviews, it allows us to put faces to the issues that we have only so far read about through secondary resources. By being able to interact first hand with the people, we get to better understand the implications of the issues, such as nutrition literacy, on the people of Chiang Mai.

The ability to conduct a research study in a foreign country is also a new learning experience for me. One of the major challenges that we will potentially face would be the language barrier where we may not be able to communicate our intentions or questions effectively to the people that we want to interview or survey. Thus, we have respond quickly to the situation on the ground as well as come up with ways in which we can minimize the impact of the language barrier in the carrying out of our research investigation. The need for us to anticipate the potential challenges that we will face while conducting our research on the ground would prove to be a valuable learning experience for future research studies.

Having never been to Chiang Mai, I do not really know what to expect. Nonetheless there are certain aspects of Chiang Mai that I wish to experience. Namely the culture, tradition and history of the Chiang Mai.

I hope that through this upcoming trip to Chiang Mai, I would be able to learn more about the culture of Chiang Mai and learn to appreciate the various traditions that the people have followed religiously for many years.  In addition to that, I would like to see how urbanization and globalization has affected culture and tradition in Chiang Mai where it is known to be a place that is experiencing rapid development. Such a topic interests me as a PPGA major where I learn about globalization and how it has benefited developing economies but has also diluted the historical culture and tradition of many societies. I also hope to learn about what the government is doing to help preserve traditionally Thai industries from the threats of globalization especially with the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Thailand is a part of.