First field trip with my classmates!

I’m studying Geographical Information Management MSc (GIM) at Cranfield and my background is in Environmental Engineering. The idea of living in the UK seemed very interesting to me. I’d planned to go to the UK, but I didn’t know that I would stay in the UK for a year or even longer. Well, that’s just life!

My first field trip with my classmates was the treasure hunter field trip in the induction week. Jermyn, Andy and I were one team, full of patience and energy. All GIM students went to a beautiful countryside nearby, and tried to find 10 answers from 10 hints. We spent about half a day to accomplish our missions. More specifically, our missions were like ‘how many types of candy does this shop have in this location?’ and ‘what’s the colour of the brand at this point?’ We had experience of using GPS toolkits after this field trip, which is quite similar with the real field investigation in the workplace.

We used the GPS toolkits to guide us to each point, and recorded the answer from the hints of our instructions. It was really interesting to explore the unknown things through this different kind of way although some hints were really tricky, and some surprises happened during our trip. During the exploration, some routes were really tricky; we were misguided by navigation and went on a longer route or entered a dead end. Some routes are really unusual; we went across footways in towns, forest paths, paths in the park and even the woodland. It was pretty interesting.

The sightseeing of villages in England was really fascinating with classical and exquisite houses. And a lot of people drove cars to walk dogs in a big park. It’s not usual to see in my country, because people are more fast-paced and busier on their work.

We accidentally came across a rugby pitch when we were trying to find a location. I didn’t know the word ‘rugby’ before, because in my country we usually call football, ‘soccer’ and rugby, ‘football’. Thanks to my English mate Andy, he explained that for me, I just knew ‘Rugby and football’ which are different names from the US. We also chatted about the different lifestyles from our countries, like ‘people tend to rent or buy an estate’, ‘the price of cars’, etc.

Finally, we accomplished our missions successfully, it was a very nice experience, we have deepened our understanding of each other gradually, and at the same time I have a clearer understanding of Britain. Cranfield is really a nice place to learn and improve myself, combining practice with knowledge from books. It is a good starting point for learning and living in the UK.