Get to Know Me in 4 minutes (Alison)
My name is Sen. It means forest in Chinese.
I grew up in many places. Up till 13 I lived in a military academy in Beijing. This is what it looked like some years ago:
Then I moved to Canada. For the first two years I lived with a homestay family in West Vancouver. Our school was on top of a hill and I would take the school bus every morning. When it snowed classes were canceled because the road was super slippery and covered in ice.
I quite enjoyed my time there. Classes were easy and because I spoke fluent English I didn’t have to take extra courses. Sometimes I would skip classes to go to the library and chill there till the classes were over.
My favorite subject was Physics. Back then I had a massive crush on our physics teacher, Mr. Trask. He secretly nominated me for an award before graduation and I received a $500 scholarship! The last time I saw him I asked him to write in my yearbook. He wrote: “You are clearly too smart for your own good, and I mean it as a compliment!”
Then he signed off as “Mr.Trash”.
The next chapter of my life started in Montreal, where I went to university. Because I got pretty decent grades in high school, I decided to go to Mcgill to study Life Sciences, hoping that one day I would go to medical school.
But in third year I was struggling and knew I was scoring below the cutoff line for med school admissions. I started writing a lot and worked for a couple of online journals. I will link a couple of articles I wrote here:
Later on I did some copy editing and a bunch of internships. It was during this period where I got introduced to a Chinese-Canadian author looking for someone to translate his short stories into English. Two of the ones I translated for him were published in my final year, and this is when I thought I would pursue translation and intepretation as a career.
Then I went to the University of Bath to do my first Master’s, which was in the UK.
No amount of pictures can describe how beautiful Bath was:
We didn’t have classes and every time the teacher came into the classroom we would be sitting in our booths speaking into a Mic, and this is what I did for a year:
Halfway through the program I did an internship at the United Nations Office in Vienna. The topic was on the peaceful use of outerspace. Lots of technical jargon. This’s when I decided I would never work here, unless I’m ok with balding at the age of 25.
But overall, I’d say in our field, most of the time you just feel brain-dead:
Later on I decided to come to HongKong to do a research Master’s, where I met this goofball:
And our adventure continues :)
