Linguistics student off to Shanghai on Premier's Scholarship

Unlike many students returning to university this fall, Brittney O'Neill doesn't have to worry about covering her tuition. The third-year UVic linguistics student is heading to East China Normal University in Shanghai as BC's sole recipient of the 2010 Irving K Barber Premier's One World Scholarship worth $20,000.

She'll spend the next two terms living in the university's downtown riverside campus taking language classes in the mornings and spending her afternoons studying and exploring the Chinese metropolis. "I'm looking forward to seeing the silk market," says the native of Fort St. John. "It's huge." O'Neill studied French in high school, but even though she arrived at UVic with a Premier's Excellence Scholarship she was concerned her grasp of French might not be good enough.

"So I chose Mandarin because it's a growing language and would be very useful to know." While O'Neill finds the UVic campus "a perfect fit, it's pastoral and laid back," she's looking forward to her first trip to China.

While Mandarin will be the focus of her undergraduate linguistics and Chinese language and literature program, O'Neill is not limiting herself to one language in the future. "I've always loved languages and I've always vacillated wildly about what I want to do with my life. I'm still that way." She's drawn to "obscure" languages such as old Irish and likes "dabbling" in Icelandic and plans to attend graduate school. "I'm considering library science, but I'm interested in everything. I can't decide what to focus on."

Among those widespread interests is a "growing addiction" to ballroom dancing, first prompted when she reluctantly attended a barn dance in Fort St. John. After arriving on campus, a fellow residence student invited O'Neill to join the UVic ballroom dance club, and she divided her summer between academic and dance classes and a dance camp on Gabriola Island.

Dancing the salsa on Shanghai's famous Bund is just one of the options for O'Neill, whose wide-ranging interests will likely always include some sort of language study. "Every language you know widens your perspective of the world. Why not learn as many as you can?"