It has been a long journey

As the Chinese saying goes: “It is better to travel ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books". For me, I love both traveling and reading. But it is the experience of traveling from China to Australia sometime eight years ago had completely changed the track of my life.

Back then, I was a university graduate and had started my first job with a government organization. The organization oversees foreign adoption activities and provides support to both orphanages and foreign foster parents. I had worked there as an interpreter and translator (along with some other office duties).  I had always lived in an area of China where there was minimal contact with other cultures or races. After having interactions with people from all over the world (majorly western) in my job, two years after I had been working there, I grew more and more interested in seeing the "outside" world a bit more (well, to be completely honest, this is only part of the reason. The growing pressure from my mother who wanted me to “settle down”, get married and have children was another reason I had to “escape”---I was in my early twenties, the idea of settling was not quite what I thought was right for me at this time!)

I had chosen to come to Australia based on a very simple fact that, Australia is a warm country full of sunshine and nice beaches (later, it was proven that I didn’t get my facts right when I decided to come to Melbourne---the city with a reputation of “four seasons in a day”).

I came to Australia on a student visa. By my third year here, I decided to stay. There are a lot of things I liked about the country, but majorly, I liked how multi-cultural it is and of course, the beautiful environment and the "fair go" spirit. The political freedom and the lifestyle choices a person has in Australia resonated with my values and beliefs. By then I had graduated from a diploma majoring in hospitality management and worked as a café manager. I loved working in hospitality where you get to interact with all sorts of people and learn to provide good customer service to a very diverse population. The café I worked in had great improvements on sales, efficiency, and work culture during the time I was managing it. My boss made compliments on how well I worked and said I had good “business sense”. It was then I started to think about further career options and getting a business degree.