Paul Fornia

I spent two months in Singapore as part of a new program called the Summer Research Internship Program (SRIP) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).  I worked on a project aimed at better understanding the interactions of Japanese industries, with help from one NTU professor, one NTU undergraduate student, and one other student in the program.  The program gave me experience with undergraduate research, several different programming languages, and giving professional quality presentations.  We also hope to publish our results in the next year or so.   

This program was perfect for me, because I do not speak any foreign languages--and all major universities in Singapore teach classes in English and most locals speak English.  Additionally, the program offered a stipend to help cover airfare and room and board.  This program gave me a chance to study in Asia, which I may not have been able to have otherwise.  Furthermore, my project used mathematics and large-scale computer simulations to study a stock market time series, so it fit very well with what I am studying at CU.

In our free time, a few other students and I visited many famous places in Singapore, like the Tiger Brewery, Marina Bay, Raffles Hotel, and a couple of world-famous nightclubs.  During two long weekends, we took trips to Kuala Lumpur and Melaka in Malaysia, and Bangkok, Thailand.  Some other students in the program also made it down to Indonesia.

I would highly recommend that every single CU student studies abroad sometime during their undergraduate career, and there is no reason not to.  I don’t speak another language, I can’t afford to fly halfway around the world on my own, and I don’t have time to spend an entire fall/spring semester abroad with a double major, yet I still found a program to fit my needs.  It was truly life changing.