Wall Street Journal Asia Fellowship at NYU

Here’s a testimonial from Eva Woo, the first recipient of the award and the first from mainland China.

For the last ten months I have been following (literally) the financial crisis as it spread from West to East; from New York to Beijing—after spending two years in New York, I moved back to Beijing a week before the Olympics.

On top of that, I’ve been lucky enough to see another equally important story of our time unfolding: the changing dynamics of capital flow, political power and communication around this world.

I say that because at Caijing magazine, a leading economic and financial publication in China where I work, we cover that story every single day. More interestingly, we are a part of the story ourselves–simpl by providing a platform for communication and understanding between the two worlds.

Luckily I am equipped to tell that story and be a part of that story with what was taught at the BER program: The inverted yield curve I first learned at the macro class two years ago predicted the recession long before anyone had a sense of it. The Foundation of Finance class taught me some of the perfect models behind the current bubble, one of the biggest in financial history.

The tricks to dig out financial details of companies and the techniques to tell a compelling story on a relatively "boring" subject taught at the journalism classes all came in handy…

Here’s a testimonial from Jason Leow, another alumni:

I have been reporting from China for nearly six years now. Before I joined the Wall Street Journal, in March 2007, I was a China correspondent for a regional English-language paper, The Straits Times, where I covered social and political issues from Beijing and Shanghai. The highlight of my time at the Straits Times came in 2003, when I had a chance to lead coverage on the Sars health pandemic, a disease that originated in southern China and that eventually killed nearly 800 people worldwide.

I came on board the Journal later, after completing the fellowship-funded graduate program at New York University and a summer internship in the Journal’s New York bureau. As I write this, at the tail-end of a very eventful 2008 (it’s November), I am again in China, working at the Beijing bureau. My job scope now includes banking and finance, a beat I’m able to handle because I had business journalism training at NYU.    But my work has involved more than that. This year, I plunged into two big disaster stories: the mega-earthquake in Sichuan province and the melamine milk scandal. There was also the Beijing Olympic Games in August, a defining moment for China and the climax of a very busy year for me.