Thanks to my father and mother, I have had the chance to gain some international experience at an early age. I've now been to twenty-one countries for all kinds of purposes and have realized more and more the importance for Chinese young people to get to know about the world. Unexpectedly, the more places I go, the farther that I'm away from China, the more love I feel about the placed where the word home belongs. Beijing, to me, is the location where Chinese people say my root is.

Instead of following all of the musts in life, I've always tended to try out things that I'm interested in. For instance, when I was young, I gave up piano after two years of practicing and changed to classical guitar instead. Similarly, because I appreciate the beauty of Cantonese and its amazing connection to the ancient Chinese, I learned the language by myself in Beijing.

I believe it is not the achievements but the crazy memories of a person's life that should be recorded as the most important times of her youth. For example, one of my most treasured recollections is traveling to Turkey for one month with another Chinese girl and going to seven cities where most people don't speak English. I'm similarly fond of the time I rode a bike with five boys to reach a city 180 km from Beijing in a single day. Finally, I happily recall the time I traveled across the whole of Northern Europe by myself and made loads of life-long friends.

The description of me that I like most is as the color of orange from one of my friends back in high school. Hope I can keep up my style whichever direction I go in life.

I love the LA Lakers and I love Real Madrid, two teams of super stars and glorious history. Deeply rooted in Confucianism, as mentioned, I highly value the powerful forces of tradition. Similarly, I value the idea of being a civil servant and take it as a fitting start to my dream career.

I am Michael, majoring in Physics, in my second year in Peking University, identity-registered in Beijing, and born in Shandong province. Physics is the perfect training for developing a logical and systematic mind, and I am taking advantage of that for I am not that naturally talented in science. Influenced by my father, I focus on Chinese social problems and have typical Chinese scholar-bureaucrat characteristics: a high sense of responsibility and a searching eye for golden mean solutions.

The best way to know a country is to visit it, but I guess for China the only way is to be there for decades. This huge nation is unprecedented in the history of humanity: 20% of the world's people with 7% of its cultivable land, one of the few communist countries, polluted, somehow westernized… The good thing is we get perfect access to have an international view to look on the problems from a perspective different from that of our father generation. We are becoming more open and in better harmony with the rest of the globe.

You may not understand why Chinese universities take the gao kao , or Chinese SAT, as the only standard of admission; you may not know why Chinese students receive such rigorous training in the natural sciences without having gotten a single Nobel Prize. Just wait for the IMUSE delegates coming! We are more than happy to be with you, sharing opinions about China with our deep affections for this great and complex nation.

I'm Andy, the only freshman on this team. I'm from the southeast coast of China. My Chinese name is Tao Ye, which means exerting a favorable influence on a person's character in English. My name is a verb in Chinese, which makes me really a man full of enthusiasm and energy. I'm now studying in the Guanghua School of Management of Peking University and plan to choose a major in finance next year.

In my opinion, I can be defined as a person of two competing facets, the very traditional and the very progressive. On the one hand, I'm so crazy about Chinese culture and music that I spent a lot of time learning Erhu and calligraphy at a pretty early age, which helped to develop my response speed and patience. On the other hand, I have also devoted quite a long time to modern science research. It is this process of trial and error leading to many interesting results that has really made me a person full of ideas and inspiration. My international experiences from London, where I represented my country in the London International Youth Science Forum, to the U.S., where I luckily got the grand prize in the Intel 2007 International Science and Engineering Fair, have helped shape my belief that mutual understanding and personal achievement are both essential to a significant life. In my leisure time, besides using music instruments to entertain myself, I play sports like basketball, football, tennis, and so on.

I am a junior student at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. Born in Beijing, I studied science in high school and pursued a double major in finance and philosophy in university. I plan to seek a career in investment banking upon graduation.

I'm very interested in thoughts in the western tradition as well as that of China, so I spend a lot of time reading. In order to better understand foreign cultures, I studied English from the age of 3 and started French in high school and German in university. My overseas experiences in the U.S., France, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and many other countries and regions have also helped me to respect and appreciate different lifestyles and the art of being human. A fan of movies and music, I try to stay informed and updated about what's going on in the world and the minds of the people in it. I also enjoy jogging and participated in the Beijing International Marathon last year.

The world we are living in, according to that bestseller, is flat– hopefully not as in the sense that it is sluggish and dull. Thanks to the Internet and DVDs–OK, I can only afford the pirated ones; don't judge me–and, ever-so-importantly, books, living in China doesn't keep you from knowing what's going on in the U.S. of A. By contrast, China may still be perceived as a hidden dragon by many a westerner. (N.B., for many thousands of years, Chinese worshipped the dragon as a symbol of the royal family, while the dragon in the west is still very much like the dinosaurs…) The Chinese civilization, home to the Confucians, Taoists, and Chinese Buddhists, a civilization paralleling those of the Greeks, Indians, and Egyptians, isn't about human rights violations, corruptions, totalitarianism, at all. I mean, AT ALL! Pas du tout ! Meanwhile, opening up since the 1980's means opening up not only to Hollywood, Britney Spears, or Playboy magazines, but also to such western thinkers as Heidegger, Leo Strauss, and Susan Sontag. Learning from others while preserving our own tradition is the task faced by the 1.3 billion Chinese, and, therefore, efficient communication on common grounds is very necessary.

Sun Tzu, a legendary Chinese general who lived more than 2500 years ago, wrote, Know your enemy and know yourself, then you are invincible. Surely the U.S. is no enemy of China, (don't you disbelieve the falsity of this…). After this trip to the prestigious universities of North America, I just want to have some real Cultural Learnings of America, for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of, of course, my People's Republic of C.H.I.N.A.

I am the number one undergraduate student of Peking University Law School. As a legal student, I have interned with several leading international law firms' mainland offices and through these internship experiences have become aware of the current Chinese legal market's great demand for local legal professionals with international educational backgrounds and cross-border transaction experience. Therefore, I'm planning to further pursue my legal education and career training in the U.K. after graduation.

Besides IMUSE, I have participated in many other international communication activities, one of which was the 2006 Peking University-University of Tokyo JING Forum. As a delegate of Peking University, I witnessed and experienced the first joint ice-breaking effort between the two top universities at a time when Sino-Japan relations had reached a crisis point. It is also through this experience that I realized the importance and the power of face-to-face communication between parties with different cultural and social backgrounds. I believe that this is what IMUSE is all about — reaching mutual understanding through the exchange of ideas directly with the other side of the table.

Having been brought up in a family of athletes, I have an inherent affinity for sports and the Olympics. I used to work as the interpreter for the American head coach of the National Softball Team and also got the opportunity to follow the winter training of the National Men's Speed Walking Team. It is through these experiences that I have obtained a distinctive perspective and gradually developed my own understanding of China's competitive sports.

Actually I'm quite confused about my English name. I've been using the name Brenda for like seven years, so please pardon me if I don't answer to my new one. I'm lucky that I'm majoring in something for which I can learn from movies and songs, or from watching Friends for just about thirty times in a row. I'm also miserable because there is no choice for me other than English because I suck at all science subjects. But what's the point for us to learn Chinese Maths so hard if all I need it for is to figure out how much money I can save from a 20% discount when shopping?

It has been great fun along with big headaches since I joined IMUSE six months ago, and I'm just happy that I'm still all alive to be able to go to the States with my friends. I'm sure the best part is coming. Hope everything goes well in North America. By the way, anyone also looking forward to the IMUSE afterparty?

I consider every foreign language as a brand-new window into the world. As a result, my proficiency in Chinese, English and Spanish, the three most spoken languages on the planet, has helped me to appreciate a broad and diverse reality as well as to form a tolerant and relatively unbiased worldview.

After hearing many stories from my parents' generation about the ration book, the intellectuals traveling to the countryside, and the cult of Mao, out of concern for the world and social responsibility, I courageously decided to go to Cuba for an exchange study in my sophomore year of college. During my eight months in Cuba, I not only mastered a foreign language and built some life-long friendships but also experienced a unique and thought-provoking journey. Currently, I'm continuing my study at Peking University and looking forward to another exchange study in Chile in July. After graduation, I hope to pursue a master's degree in Latin American Studies in the United States.

Addicted to cross-cultural communication, I find it such an enriching and horizon-broadening experience to exchange ideas with people from different cultural backgrounds. Ever since I entered Peking University, I have been a very active member of SICA (Students' International Communication Association) and have been involved in all sorts of cross-cultural activities. My experiences working as a Spanish and English interpreter on various important occasions have made me realize that, as a foreign language major, one of my major roles in terms of international communication is to serve as an ambassador among cultures in order to minimize language barriers and to foster mutual understanding.

My hobbies include playing the piano, swimming, playing Ping-Pong, watching movies and American shows, volunteering at care centers for autistic children in my spare time, etc.

I'm Vivian from Peking University, which is often compared to Harvard and Yale in your country by us Chinese people. My major is finance, about which I don't have a very clear idea yet.

My friends say that I'm complicated. When they first meet me, they think that I am quiet and mild, don't talk much, and always keep everything inside. But when our relationship gets closer, they say that I'm bold, risk-taking, and sometimes even weird and crazy. I don't know if we'll stay in the States long enough to show you the real, crazy Vivian.

One thing that makes me different is, perhaps, my way of thinking. Both of my parents are loyal supporters of the traditional Chinese culture, which did have a great influence on me. They taught me to be tolerant, to be nice to people, to understand others, and to be sympathetic. Well, I have been greatly affected by that. I'm not critical or aggressive—at least I have tried hard never to be like that. I tend to be tolerant, to be mild about everything. I believe in beauty, in love, and in humanity. I don't think that there is absolute evil in this world.

Based on all the sources I have in China, I believe that Americans tend to be critical. They'll make every effort to defend truth, freedom, and democracy as they see it. Based on this information, I guess I have a totally different personality from that of a typical American. Despite what I have heard, however, all the Americans that I have contacted so far have just been mild, friendly, and nice like me. So one of the reasons that I joined this fancy project, IMUSE, is that I want to see with my own eyes how critical and aggressive Americans can be at all; I'm really curious about that. And I do believe that my American peers may wonder the same about me as well.

Smiling, Considerate and Hardworking are the three most frequently used words when my friends describe me.

When I was a child, I spent most of my spare time practicing Chinese calligraphy. Thanks to five years learning this profound art, I have developed a concentrated mind and an introverted character. These aspects of my personality have greatly influenced my experience over the years.

Five years ago, I was sent to Conestoga High School in Philadelphia as an exchange student. During my six-week stay, I experienced the typical suburban American family school life. By talking with people who have different ideas and cultural backgrounds from me, and by doing things that I had never imagined I would do, I suddenly found myself liberated from my internal self and more connected to the world. This first trip to the United States inspired my interest in intercultural communication and stimulated great curiosity about the world, which developed into another aspect of my personality.

Because of this interest in cross-culture communication, I chose English as a minor in university and took every chance to participate in student international forums. When I attended the Northeast Asia Network in South Korea in 2006, I first realized how much misunderstanding there could be even among countries rooted in similar cultures. Last winter, I volunteered for the largest HIV+ network in India and managed a self-arranged trip throughout the country after work. This full-of-adventure-and-trial experience strongly evoked my awareness of how greatly culture can affect people's thoughts and result in gaps between the nations of this world.

With the hope that misconception is to be eliminated and gaps are to be bridged, I'm here, ready for IMUSE.

Hey everyone, I am Wu Di from Tsinghua Law School. My name in Chinese means invincibility and being the best. Someone says that one's name indicates her destiny; I believe that this is true to some extent. Having a great passion for excellence, I am always on my way to another challenge.

Although I wanted to be a lawyer when I was young, I decided to choose journalism as my undergraduate major at Tsinghua to make my education more like that of an American pre-law student because I believe that my understanding of law will be better when I have some basic knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. Another reason is that my dad thinks that journalism fits me because I am extroversive, and journalists make a decent life. But it turned to be wrong since I was (and still am) such a maverick that joining the mainstream media is definitely not my career choice.

My dream to become a lawyer never faded during my undergraduate life, so I went to Tsinghua law school, where I was the only student who did not have an LL.B. degree. Motivating my pursuit of an education in law is my belief that constructing a reasonable legal system is more effective in promoting social welfare than simply being the fourth estate with the power of mass media. Now I devote myself to health law not only because I am influenced by my mom, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, but also because it is a new and meaningful field in which few Chinese scholars conduct research. The Chinese Mental Health Act and the access to opiates in China are the projects that I am currently focusing on.

The deeper I research, the more I feel responsible for promoting human rights and social welfare. And through my experiences as the only Chinese delegate in some international student festivals, I am aware that China's image on the international stage is not as it is described domestically. Gradually, I have changed my mind about being a lawyer because I realize that the world never lacks a single lawyer so that I may not contribute too much to society as one myself. As a strong believer of a world without boundaries, right now I dream of being a social activist who can influence my immediate community as well as the world at large.

Academics do not fill in all the blanks in my schedule. Unlike some nerd students, I'd rather spend my time singing and practicing Taekwondo. Having been a soprano in the Tsinghua choir group for five years, I deem singing part of my life because whenever I sing with my group, I feel so harmonious and peaceful. As for Taekwondo, I practiced it when I was obsessed with Korean culture. (I wish I could be like the stereotypically submissive Korean girls that I see in television dramas, though Taekwondo definitely does not help me build up that image). A hurricane kick is so cool, especially when I crack boards with it! Also, Taekwondo teaches me to be persistent in dealing with challenges as well as chasing my goals.

I regard IMUSE as a great opportunity for communicating with American students and thus correcting misconceptions we hold about each other. This trip is challenging, yet I am doing my best, as always.

I am a cute boy from Guangxi, China. The beautiful garden Tsinghua University has been my new heaven with my constant efforts and good luck. As a typical Tsinghua student, I travel in the broad ocean of science and technology with both pain and happiness. Although the coast seems to be rather unreachable from this lonely spot out at sea, the glamour of my studies seizes me strongly.

But I am never satisfied with being merely a typical Tsinghua student. I am just like a vigorous molecule rushing through every corner of the campus. The success of acting as the leading role in the class play for the student festival night has made me quite famous in my department's entertainment circles. Openness and optimism constitute my constant state of mind, and I will never stop pursuing the goal of a better life. I am like a fat and lovely panda, the mascot of our team. It is my great pleasure to bring happiness to everyone using my silly humor and my smile on my face. ^_^

If I must choose one identity for people to know about me, it would be as a dedicated movie fan, who is constantly and persistently trying to make his way in the movie-making industry. I can't tell the number of the movies I have seen, but I do remember the first time I had the idea of making a movie of my own. It was in the last year of my primary school time, when my father bought the first camera in the family. As an eleven-year-old, I had no idea about lighting, editing, music composing, or any other aspects of the industry, but I had the passion and the charisma to bring a bunch of kids together to make a first attempt at video storytelling. This first movie-making endeavor was a mix of Home Alone , Star Wars , the Fifth Element , and, of course, long periods of toil without any effect. And we didn't even finish shooting the whole thing. But I ultimately realized that this was what I was going to do for a lifetime. And this belief got me into PKU seven years later.

I am now the chief of staff of the IMUSE program in Peking University. During my college days, I have had great international experiences. I was invited, for instance, to visit the U.N. Headquarters in New York for my excellent reception and escort work for Joseph V. Reed, Under-Secretary-General of the U.N., during my stay in Beijing. I was also one of the initiators and core organizers of the JING Forum, an exchange program between Peking University and the University of Tokyo. I helped make it the best non-official exchange platform for China and Japan and, through it, witnessed the ice-breaking of Sino-Japanese relations. I was one of the Chinese student representatives to George Bush's 2007 China-U.S. Relations Conference in Washington, D. C., with Minister Li Zhaoxing, the former Chinese minister of Foreign Affairs. I have also journeyed to Studio Babelsberg in Germany, the largest film studio in Europe.

Besides my major in marketing, I continue to follow my passion for producing films. I was the founder of an Internet-based studio with students from twenty major universities nationwide and have produced three full-length feature DV movies. I have written screenplays myself, for I can't stop being struck by various quixotic ideas of storytelling, and I act in theatre plays, which has gotten me an award from the university for Best Actor. I am currently working towards my dream to continue my education in film production by getting a Master of Fine Arts in the United States.

I am currently an M.S. Finance candidate at Tsinghua University. As a typical Gemini, I enjoy trying out new things, meeting new friends, going to new places, and immersing myself in extensive travel and cultural diversity. As a freshman, I met former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and asked him a tough question (if you'd like to know what it was, you have to ask me!). Last year, I was awarded a fellowship from the British and Chinese governments to gain a half-year work experience in London. As a well-known Master of Ceremonies on campus, I have served as the emcee for almost 100 events. Additionally, I have been leading actress in quite a few plays as well as directed and acted in several original performances.

With great passion for the first-ever Olympic games held in a developing country, I used to be in charge of the recruitment, management, and training of 6,000 volunteers for the Beijing Olympics, and have thus been deeply involved in the event. Proud of our history and civilization, I have also worked in the sphere of Chinese cultural promotion, with a four-month internship at the Chairman's Office of HSBC Holdings in cooperation with CHINA NOW, the UK's largest-ever Chinese cultural festival.

I feel that it is my responsibility and honor to let the essence of contemporary China and the coming Beijing Olympics present themselves to the rest of the world. I am, therefore, thrilled to participate in IMUSE!

Believing that a person's name can best show her character, I've decided to introduce myself by sharing with you both my Chinese name and my English name.

My Chinese name, which is Liu Dandan (刘丹丹), was decided by my grandpa. Actually, this name is more often regarded as a nickname, for it is really simple and maybe too ordinary. And my mother once thought of changing it into some Chinese characters which few people could pronounce or even recognize. However, I stopped her from doing so, for I believed that this name somehow determined why I became who I am right now, a simple and easygoing girl who is always willing to love and care.

My English name, Sunny, on the other hand, was chosen by myself. The Sun has an unfailing appeal for me, for it is so powerful and is always embracing people with great warmth, driving out our coldness and negative feelings. I know I can never be like the Sun, but this is what I spare no effort trying to do. Besides studying, I've devoted myself to various extracurricular activities including organizing parties, traveling around for cultural exchange, and playing my beloved badminton and billiards in order to make myself more comprehensive and powerful. At the same time, I never forget to share all the happiness and fun with my peers and all the beloved in my life. A SMILE, in my eyes, is forever the best makeup; ATTITUDE, forever the thing that conquers all.

For the great project IMUSE, in my opinion, can be interpreted as, I'M to be here in US, for U to see the real ME, for ME to see the real U.