MYP8 AOI One-day Trip to Suzhou

By: MYP 8 (1) Jessica Goh

Last Tuesday on October 29th , MYP8 went to Suzhou for the October AOI trip. We visited the worldwide famous private company Bosch, and a famous tourist attraction in Suzhou. We departed school early in the morning at approximately 7:30, leaving with a heart of curiosity and the IB learner profile of being Open-Minded a risk-taker and an Inquirer.

We arrived Suzhou at around 9am, and watched a video about the history and the operating systems of the Bosch company introduced by it’s German general manager in Chinese. Bosch is an engineering and electronics company, and it is the world’s largest supplier of automobile components. The founder of Bosch is Robert Bosch in 1886. Now, it has expanded worldwide with more than 350 subsidiaries across 60 countries

After a short lecture by Bosch’s Chinese engineer, we learnt that Bosch’s core products are automobile components, for example brakes, controls, electronics, fuel systems, generators, steering systems, starter motors and so on. Bosch’s products are sold in around 150 countries.

We are lucky enough to witness the testing of Bosch’s breaking system in it’s testing site. We can see the cars with different systems driving on a simulated drive road with different problems. Roads that are bumpy, curvy, or snowy, rainy or slippery. With so many precautions and tests to confirm the safeness of one product, we can see that Bosch cares about the safety of the product rather than the price. Further more, we also learnt that more tests will be taken in different parts of china, where more severe weather conditions are testing the new products. For example places that have a harsh winter that snow heavily.

Then, a short tour around the company, we notice that Bosch’s architectures are not necessarily different and tall. It is, in fact, uniformed and the same all around the world.  After a quick lunch, we headed to the tourist site of Suzhou, Baimajian.

Bai Ma Jian is a home to many plants. Walking into the garden, we can see many temples from both sides. When we reach the end, we can see a breathtaking man made waterfall that is shining under the blazing hot sun. Bridges that connect the people to other parts of the park. Unfortunately, many temples are under construction so we are unable to go inside to take a look. We also didn’t have a lot of time to explore the whole park as it was time to head back to school. The time to travel back to Shanghai might take up more than 2 hours if we are stuck in traffic!

This AOI trip not only taught us to be a risk-taker, it also taught us to be an open minded student. We might be studying things that we are not interested in, but we need to accept the ideas around us to make us a more balanced person. This is what it takes to be a global citizen.