What should I do? (I may be an ass.)

[Kurochan]

Hi --

It's my first posting in a long time, or maybe ever. You see, I lost my password for a while.

I have this dilemma I mentioned on Dave's board, and I don't know what to do about it. So let me recap it here, and people can tell me their thoughts about it.

OK, so while I've enjoyed teaching at Shenzhen U (despite its dubious reputation), I've had enough of it, and enough of Shenzhen. I applied to a few other schools. I got a job offer immediately from East China Normal University. It's for 12-16 teaching hours a week. At first, that sounded good, until I found out the salary was 7500, but just 4500 if I lived on campus! I thought about totally throwing over the offer, but then I found out the school is considered the best normal college in the country. It'd be cool, and interesting to teach at a top school. Some people say it'd be in my best interest to teach there, since maybe it'd help me get a job in the US later. Other people say since nobody in the US knows any universities other than Beida and Qinghua, it won't make any difference. Some people say I wouldn't be able to rent an apt and make ends meet on 7500, and other people say I would.

My other probable offer is from Guangxi University, 6500 a month, free accomodation, 18-20 hours a week. I don't know a lot about Nanning, but I'm going tomorrow to check it out. (I do know it has a lot of minorities in that area, which interests me, although I also know I hate the dirt and bugs of the countryside where they live.)

I'm trying to decide between the two. There are lots of factors involved. I worry a lot about money, and if I werent' saving money, I'd feel worried and depressed. I think I'd be hard pressed to spend much money in Nanning. On the other hand, I really want to get out and meet more people. I want cultural stuff, like movies and concerts. I want to meet cool people. I want to date. I'm thinking Shanghai would be much better for that. Also, if I taught 12 or 14 hrs a week, it probably wouldn't be hard for me to find some outside work and make more money. Right? I don't live a really wild lifestyle or anything -- I mean, I don't go out on weekends and spend a ton on beer or anything. Mostly, I like to buy clothes, dumb pencil boxes, see movies, and go to concerts.

It's hard for me to know what to do, and periodically I get really depressed, especially if I'm afraid I've made the wrong decision. So I don't know what to do.

(I'd thought about going back to the US too for a while, but I don't think I ready for that! )

I don't know -- what do you think I should do? I need change and activity, and to save a little money (more than 2,000 US a year would make me happy).

Any advice for your humble, freaking out, correspondent?

[Raoul Duke]

Hey Kurochan!

FIRST: My personal take is to go with ECNU. 7500 is pretty grim if you also have to rent an apartment on it, but I concur that it is technically doable.

Once here, you can work on improving things. You could negotiate some overtime hours or work a part-time job to help pad the pockets a bit. You can keep looking for bargains in housing, too...hard to find but still there if you're really lucky and patient.

Note that this is my personal take. I'd rather live in Shanghai than in Nanning, I think. I'd also go with the Uni with the better reputation as a place to work, and I strongly suspect ECNU is an easy winner on that score. I agree that it won't mean diddley squat back in the States, but it might make your life better here. If you're really concerned with money, you should probably go to Nanning...I think 6500 will go a lot further there than 7500 less rent will go in Shanghai.

SECOND: forget those varlets and ungentlemanly persons over at that stank Cafe, and post here where people know ya and love ya. We been wondering where ya been...Welcome Home, Kurochan.

A general note to all...don't ever be a lost sheep! If you ever lose your password, just e-mail me at [e-mail] and I'll reset your password in two shakes of a lamb's tail! Baaaaaaaa!!!#nosmileys

[burlives]

A while back I had an offer at Zhejiang University, a wonderful, tippity-top school, they have Fulbright scholars visit! 16 hours, 3500 a month, shared apartment.

I liked Hangzhou and the school campus gave me a good feeling so I considered it for some time, on the one condition of a non-shared apartment. I asked my old professor back in Aus if he'd heard of ZJU. Nope, hadn't. Fudan? Nope. Whatever, I visited for a week.

During that week I got more and more wound up, to the point of blowing a fuse in conversation with the designated pudwhacker, the guy doing the school's negotiating. Basically, they were trading in meat and kinda let it show.

I have the feeling that the big schools know the prevailing standard in foreign teachers and they choose to respond in one of two ways: they get into more private, circumspect hiring, headhunting higher quality employees, or they accept the standard and use their own market weight to drive conditions down. I think the latter may be more common. Because Chinese academies don't have international reputations. Having international visitors works to an academy's advantage within China and I think that's about the size of it, even granting that individual academic links of substance are formed.

Personally, if ECNU were well located, if they agreed to no more than 12 teaching periods a week and showed a willingness to generate a reasonable timetable, I'd take a shot at making 4500 work in Shanghai. If the apartment was nice. Also there has to be no regularly visible assholes on staff. I'd be there to do a job and check out the life. And I'm not a spender so maybe that makes a difference too.

If you want to check out ECNU's real standing in the academic world, go journal hunting. Do ECNU staff often turn up in international journals of note as stocked in big American school libraries? Betcha they don't. To be in international academic contention, their staff need publication records.

One day they will.

[beerdang]

In general, peole in States don't know any other university in other countries.

Beida and Qinghua gained more exposure simply because some gradutate programs in US have majority of students from only these two schools. Occasionally some famous people such as Bill Gates and Bill Clintion's will visit these schools while in China.

ECNU is a good school in China, but few people will know about it in US. I would still think your teaching iteself will be rewarding. It is also in a nice location , and a lot of pretty girls.

For whatever you want to do, Shanghai will provide more opportunities. It will definately be a very different experience comparing to work in Nanning. High living expenses are common for big cities. You can get by with your income if you know where things are.

[Wolf]

Personally, I like the ENCU job.

Green light reasons:

-Lower teaching hours.
-More interesting location (to me, anyway.)
-Chance to teach at a top school in China. Even if no one cares back home, it could still be interesting.
-Higher chance of "meeting cool people/dating;" as least as far as reputation goes.
-even 4500 + free accomodation ought to be enough to live on.
Cautionary points:

-Everything that Burl said. Try to keep them at 12 hours if possible. Also try to get them to throw in free utilities, broadband, etc. Even I get that. And there must be a lack of jerks. And private accomodation.

-4500/month in Shanghai probably means no saving. But, I guess you could work on the side a bit to get that 16 000/year you'd like to save.


I worry about things like that too. It sounds like you'd have a better experience at ECNU.

[Kurochan]

Hmmm .... Thanks for the advice, everybody!

How do you go about negotiating with the school, without turning them off toward you? I'm afraid if I negotiate, they'll just tell me to take a hike and not come.

[Raoul Duke]

Negotiating should be OK if you keep it friendly. Bear in mind that Unis are much more constrained by the local Education Bureaus than are private English mills, which at least gives them something convenient to hide behind, and are generally much less negotiable than private schools- especially where salary is concerned.

[burlives]

Recently I negotiated a job I'll go to in July. It was all email. My tactic, for better or worse, is small bites, daily. One question a day, one agreement a day.

Day one establishes the basic answers: how many teaching hours, how many students in a class, how much a month. After that you trade variations as suit you. I have found in email correspondence that FAOs can't handle too many questions. They really want to write single paragraph answers that gloss over every point. Hence my one day, one question policy. Each day includes some agreement on past discussion and introduces a variation of some further question. For better or worse, I tend to agree early and nevertheless continue negotiating, by for example saying at some appropriate juncture, okay, I have a good impression of your school so I agree to come and work, and then I say, also I'd like to know... My form of negotiating tends to be of the "I'd like to know if you can, would, will, might..." style plus I tend to go low on some concerns.

It depends a lot on the email style of the FAO representative. But I suspect that if they try to be hard-asses or excessively vague in email, then it'll be a tough working environment too. I believe without really knowing that this form of negotiation is analogous to negotiating over a drawn-out supper, which I'm supposed to believe is the Chinese way, and if they're not being Chinese about it, then something is up.

To back up that kind of negotiation I really like to also be in contact with present foreign staff, bearing in mind that foreigners are idiots. Take what foreigners say with a grain of salt. Every friggen foreigner I've ever talked to gives a thumbs up to their dump without ever really giving an outline of what they've decided they can forego for their one year in.