Haoyue from China, Ph.D in Mass Communication and Media Arts

My name is Haoyue Zhang--Zhang Haoyue in Chinese.  I'm from China.

This is my 4th year of PhD study here at SIU.  My interest is in film studies, particularly in Chinese films.

My dissertation is going to be about childhood - representations of children in Chinese film.  My chair of dissertation committee, Jyotsna Kapur, has published a book about children's culture in capitalist countries.  When I first applied for SIU, one thing that really attracted me is as long as you got admitted, you would be offered an assistantship.  I think that's really helped a lot.  One thing that I've really enjoyed is doing teacher assistant for film history, we call it CP101.

I think from this student work, you can also get a lot of practical experience about how to work with students, how to work with people.  I went to several pretty big conferences  Of course for me,  I just felt like nobody there, there's a lot of big scholars, very famous people there.  But I think it still helped me to realize what's the trend and what's the hot topic, and then it's not like you just follow them, but you might add it in to your research.

I used to think theory is really kind of dry and flat.  But now I really like the precision and also that how do you say, reservation of expressing your ideas.  So that's the fun part I think.  I'm planning to go back to China to teach because one of my teachers of my graduate school gave me such kind of offer, and it's a pretty good university.  So I might go back to teach.  I think that I can help them a lot with this children's film and children's culture area.  I think all these resources I can bring back to China and ask them to bring more resources.

I think faculty here for me at least give me some benefit for my future work.  So if you want to come here to study, I recommend you of course, you have to focus really hard on your work because it's really intense.  But at the same time, try to connect with people here and the life here.