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 already got a little taste of the two weeks we will be spending in China. For 12 hours, my classmates and I took a train down to D.C. to do a test run of our presentations and programs that we will be presenting at several Universities and agencies in Beijing and Shanghai.
It was an early morning for our class; we were all expected to be up by 6:45 a.m. to catch our train on a Friday (which is wild, because I don’t even take recitations on Fridays—but here we are).
Our first stop after we reached Union station, which is gorgeous by the way, was the Penn Washington Center. In the PWC, we did a roundtable with all of our class, presenting a sixty second “elevator pitch” of the policy proposals we had been crafting throughout the yeaThe sixty-second pitch is meant to keep our proposals tight and direct, while also reminding us that policymakers rarely read more than a page. As Shakespeare says, brevity is the soul of wit. We presented these papers to members of various government departments, think tanks, and NGOs, some of whose work we had been reading throughout the year, which was insanely cool.
They offered us feedback on our points and pointed out more gaps in our research as we moved forward, which was super helpful. We then had lunch with a NPR China correspondent, to talk about how we should expect to talk and ask questions with students in China, and alleviate some of our fears about travelling in this heightened state. The PWC has a stunning view of the Capitol which was our next stop.
These next three locations and experiences came as a whirlwindWe met with staff members on the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition and had an in-depth conversation about biotech and future areas of competition. Next was the State Department, where – which was most interesting to me, as my policy proposal is on Educational policy recommendations – we met with members of the China House, and the Bureau Educational and Cultural Affairs and talked about the future of Fulbright and other programs like CLS (Critical Language Scholars), and NSLI-Y (National Security Language Initiative for Youth). Which are programs I have been mentioning in my papers.
After the state department, we traveled to the coolest place on our journey, nestled in a residential neighborhood in Forest Hills, D.C. on a street with a few other embassies is the Chinese embassy. We got to visit and meet with diplomats from the Chinese embassy! Saying it out loud and writing it down is just as crazy as being there. It was a genuinely surreal experience that I legitimately do not think you get elsewhere. We got to talk about tariffs, leadership changes, and other topics that are more pertinent to the global climate right now.
If you can tell, a lot of the day was spent talking, and the rest of it was trying to travel between all these places, running late to meetings, and running from meetings It was a very, very, very long day, but it’s all in preparation for each day in China, which will run similar to these. Presenting and talking with students, professors and government officials, and editing our reports even further. Even with all this, we will be visiting the Great Wall, and other sites. What I’m more excited about, to be honest, is the good eats. I have been dreaming about Peking duck, soup dumplings, sweet and sour pork, and spicy hot pot. It’s going to be a very long and tiring trip, but so rewarding.
Shout out to Naddy Teo, whose digital camera will be the one capturing a lot of this upcoming trip, and who took these photos.
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