Asia

  • Blog

Hard Work and Homelet

GRIP: Sustainable Development in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam My fellow interns at Nuoa aren’t just work colleagues. They are my Grab Car commute buddies and the first customers of Homelet! Well, Homelet isn’t technically a restaurant. It’s just me and my coworkers Shaomin and Marcus eating omelets in my apartment in Ho Chi Minh…

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5 Things You Need To Know Before Bustling Through Bangkok

GRIP: PR and Marketing in Bangkok, Thailand Bring Lightweight Clothing Before this program, I had never been anywhere near the Eastern Hemisphere, so you can imagine my surprise when the heat and humidity hit me like a truck. Even though I researched beforehand, the heat still caught me off guard. What saved me was packing…

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Catalysts, Courts, and Chilli: My Singapore Experience

GRIP: Engineering Research in Singapore Spending a summer in Singapore, I imagined long hours in the lab, challenging scientific problems, and maybe a few late-night reactions. I got all of that, and so much more. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d learn outside the lab: from the chaos of hawker centers to the…

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What the Wind Knows: Notes from the Steppe

PGS: Mongolian Civilization: Nomadic and Sedentary Will, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares his experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed. Why go to Mongolia? Maybe you love to travel. Maybe you’re interested in nomadism. Maybe you’re interested…

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Cat Nguyen

Contact Ask Me About… My Experience Abroad Studying abroad has granted me the opportunity to make meaningful steps down my academic path as a Biology major on the pre-med track with a Korean minor. This semester represented an immersive chance to test my language skills and advance my fluency. Although I’ve been studying Korean for a few years now, I…

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In the Absence of Certainty

PGS: Rivalry, Competition and International Security in Northeast Asia Lala, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed. Ten days is not a long time. But, being immersed in a new…

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Packing for Wakefulness: Mongolia Beyond The Map

PGS: Mongolian Civilization: Nomadic and Sedentary Will, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares his experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed. The movie director David Lynch once said that “If you have a golfball sized consciousness, when you…

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Founders, Food, and First Impressions

GRIP: KK FundTaipei, Taiwan When I first landed in Taiwan for my internship at the KK Fund, I had no idea what my day-to-day would look like. Venture capital was something I had only studied from the outside — pitch decks, public profiles, theoretical models. But within the first week, I realized VC is anything…

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Trial by Frantic Ubers: 12 Hours in D.C. to Prep for Ten Days in China

PGS: Policy Task Force on U.S.-China Relations Emilia, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed. Even though the travel portion of this class is technically yet to begin, my class…

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Packing Light, Except for the Historical Baggage

PGS: Rivalry, Competition and International Security in Northeast Asia Lala, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed. I’m a history major who’s only ever taken one class that touched on…