Five Faculty of Arts students will be spending the next academic year off campus. Way off campus.

Eric Fowler, Rebecca Troke, Collin Kelloway, Lucas Lee and Chelsea Smith have all been named as winners of a scholarship that will take them to China for the 2013-14 academic year. 

The purpose of the scholarship is to strengthen mutual understanding and friendship in the wider world and to develop co-operation and exchange in the fields of education, science, culture, economy and trade between China and other countries.

It is facilitated by representatives from Memorial University and the Department of Education of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Preference is given to students that have completed two to three semesters of introductory chinese language lessons.

The five students are doing different programs but at some point have all taken a Chinese language course from religious studies professor Dr. Lee Rainey.

“This is the first time we have had five students win the scholarship, the most we've had before is three,” said Dr. Rainey, whose research interests include Daoism, Confucianism and Chinese philosophy. “This result shows the strength of our Chinese language program and the hard work of the students who won.”

Mr. Kelloway is a third-year linguistics student from Mount Pearl who plans to study Mandarin while at university in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province in eastern China. His Mandarin is currently “pretty good – I use it to chat a lot with Chinese students here in St. John’s and online with people in China.”

Mr. Kelloway, who carries a Chinese vocabulary notebook everywhere he goes, explains that with numerous homophones (two words that sound exactly the same) and one of the fewest syllable counts of any language, Mandarin is “all about the context.”

Mr. Fowler is doing a joint honours in English language and literature and religious studies and will be spending next year at the Beijing Language and Culture University. He is currently studying in Ireland but in an email interview commented: “I have never lived in a city larger than St. John's and so it will surely be a culture shock in many ways. Studying in an Irish Gaeltacht has given me a glimpse of what it's like to study in a native environment and it's really incredible. I'm very much looking forward to learning in China.”

Eligibility criteria, application forms and procedures about the Chinese Scholarship is available by contacting Dr. Lee Rainey on lrainey@mun.ca.