China

This course explores Shanghai and facilitates students' personal experience in the city as well as China. Students use their own first-hand observations, coupled with broad-based readings in a range of social science areas, to reach an understanding about Shanghai and the rapid pace of China’s modernization. The course values empirical experiences. By fieldwork as well as observation, students see the city through their own eyes. The reflection over first hand empirical experiences are included in the assignments, presentations and final work. Students critically argue their empirical experiences by making comparison between Shanghai and other cities, by looking into the cultural or institutional background of their observation.

This course presents the basic principles of market research to provide understanding of the basic content and basic characteristics of market research in marketing communication activities, and lays a good foundation for further learning the marketing theory and skills of advertising and public relations. The course also discusses the relationship between the various links of market research and the inherent rules of those activities; the general situation and latest developments of domestic and international market survey activities and theories, and the reality, theory and experience of domestic and international market surveys; and the link between theory and practice and the basic principles and methods of preliminary investigation, planning and effect measurement of marketing communication activities.

Through the lens of sociology and psychology, this course explores interpersonal relationships, including kinship, friendship, love, and marriage. It looks at interpersonal relationships as an essential component of human social interaction. The course also analyzes the reasons for conflict and ways to improve interpersonal relationships.

This course introduces asset pricing and investment, beginning with asset pricing theory, empirical problems and the latest theory developed to solve these problems. Specifically, the course explores mean-variance analysis, expected earnings, beta models, and factor structures, such as classic CAPM, APT and the recently developed fama-French five-factor model and q-theoretical four-factor model. The course also covers the stock and derivatives markets, as well as personal and institutional investment. It involves many computational problems. The computing language R will be used. MatLab, and other programs such as Python, C, SAS or STATA can also be used.

The aim of Spoken Chinese is to enhance the proficiency of oral communication by learning common vocabularies and sentences.

Advanced Class: For those who have vocabulary skill of more than 2500 Chinese words. The course aims to enable students to discuss and communicate their ideas on general social topics.

The boundary between art and non-art has become increasingly blurred, and any object or even behavior can become art. Therefore, entering the art scene to observe, think, and understand itself has become a part of the art work. Through a series of service learning activities such as on-site research of art works and presentation of art exhibition links, this course shifts the focus of learning art from the interpretation of second-hand information on artists, creative methods, and work forms to the art world. Lectures and seminars focus on the theoretical analysis of modern and contemporary art, the artist’s creative methods, the morphological characteristics of works and the current art exhibition.

This course aims to explain the importance of various natural processes and human activities that shape the modern Earth and lead to global environmental change based on the interdisciplinary scientific principles of climate, ecosystems, and biogeochemistry. The course uses primary scientific literature, presentations, videos and the discussion on global change prediction, assessment and policy measures to provide a critical understanding of physical climate system and its variability, the carbon cycle and related biogeochemistry and ecosystem processes, land use issues, the interactions among climate, ecosystems and biogeochemistry, and the impact of global change on societally relevant parameters. You should be able to read and interpret a scientific paper and assess a global change-related topic or policy in the context of multiple disciplines.