Every human being who was good at life had goals. I can’t profess to be a success yet, but by the following standards, perhaps my foray into the Orient (again, I promise to stop saying that word once I get there) will be.

The Job
-To have a completed project I can point at and say, ‘Look what I did!’ (i.e. a restaurant I opened, ad advertising campaign I created, or a country named after me)
-To be on a first name basis with my boss and co-workers and be able to call them friends for life
-To be offered the chance to return for a permanent position (even though I’d never accept)

The Culture
-To improve my Chinese to the point that I feel comfortable negotiating a room, buying food, getting a job, and sweet talking a young Chinese girl in a rural village
-To be able to voice the subtle differences between American and Chinese business
-To learn to cook a variety of vegetarian Chinese dishes well enough to reproduce them for friends in the States who will (1) recognize that it is Chinese food and (2) not order pizza
-To develop a thorough enough understanding of the relationship between average citizen and government that I can convince someone at a party that I wrote a book on the subject
-To develop a thorough enough understanding of the Chinese water shortage that I can convince someone at a party that I wrote a book on the subject

Exploring
-To exhaust all worthy day trips from Shanghai
-To win a photo contest of some sort with the pictures I acquire in the surrounding areas
-To run up and down the Bund so often that I can wave to people who will wave back and smile

People
-To make enough friends in Shanghai that I can return and live and eat free for a month
-To meet at least one friend to intelligently discuss each of the following topics with: social entrepreneurship projects, Chinese economic growth, Chinese education, China’s water crisis, and nanotechnology

Free time
-To upgrade the Engineers Without Borders USC website to the point that any student interested in joining can look at the the site and understand exactly where we are at
-To construct a personal web page that includes my current projects, travels, reads, interests, hikes, classes, and more
-To solidify my calculus to the point that I no longer have to qualify explanations in physics with, “My calculus isn’t perfect but…”

This post will be fluid and subject to edits up until I leave.