it was a sunny saturday afternoon in the campus of school of software at dalian university of technology. over 400 graduate and undergraduate students gathered in a packed lecture hall for a 4-hour information exchange session known as the sun tech day. some of the students were bused from the main campus 50 kilometers away for this sun university touring event.
i was in beijing for other businesses and was invited to give a talk to kick off this event. i also took the opportunity and met with faculty members, school administrative leaders and students. the focus of the event was on opensolaris. michael cui discussed software system serviceability in solaris environment and touched on best practices and enabling technologies such as sunmc, fma, dtrace and jmx. william xue discussed the sun studio integrated development environment for solaris and linux. fiona duan talked about opensolaris installation and project indiana. the interactions and feedbacks on these sessions were overwhelmingly well and encouraging.
as for my session, i tried something different this time which i have never done before. after i walked up to the podium while waiting for my slides to be projected, i introduced myself in mandarin chinese to fill the time gap. and i decided to continue my session in mandarin instead of in english as i originally planned. speaking mandarin is a stretch for me specially when it comes to business or technical terms and conversations. english would be my language of choice for this type of setting and cantonese would be my second choice.
my one-hour session went by very quickly with good interactions and Q&A. although i may never know for sure whether my messages would come across better or worse for the audience if i delivered in english instead, there is one thing i know for sure - i felt a lot more closer with the audience and i glad i did.
That's very cool, for you to deliver in Mandarin. I think you found some terminologies challenging. Other than that, you probably won the hearts of the audience.
Posted by Sin-Yaw Wang on May 02, 2008 at 08:36 PM EDT #
Hi Andy, i just noticed your blog here.
I would like to say: "Thank you" firstly. Then go to reply your concern: "i may never know for sure whether my messages would come across better or worse for the audience if i delivered in english instead"
From the communication with students after the event, they were so excited to hear from your message in Chinese plus a bit English. That was a fresh experience to most of them. In fact, they preferred to listen to Chinese presentation. So back to your concern, they thought you were so nice to them and liked you a lot.
Pls join us more often into these events if it is possible.
Posted by Fiona Duan on May 03, 2008 at 11:03 AM EDT #