Former college major offers few career options

Li Guo is a 26-year-old postgraduate student at Beijing Language and Culture University majoring in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages. She worked as a volunteer teacher at the University of Piura in Peru in 2013.

I had always wanted to work as a volunteer teacher overseas, but in 2013, there were only four countries from which I could choose to work , and none of them had English as their mother tongue.

I took eight hours of Spanish classes before heading to Peru, bearing in mind how to say "hello" and "thank you" in Spanish. During my first six months teaching at the University of Piura in northern Peru, I spent most of my evenings and weekends studying Spanish on my own with textbooks I had borrowed from local Chinese students. I gradually made friends with local students with the little Spanish I learned.

But in the first six months, I was extremely lonely and I missed Chinese food terribly.

I still think I had a once-in-a-lifetime experience teaching in Peru. Local students were nice to me, and always tolerant of my mistakes in Spanish. Many students wanted to learn Chinese as they saw the language as very useful in their future careers; for example, for those at companies willing to do business with China.

Yet what's haunting me now is to how to land a job in Beijing.

I applied for the major of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages at Zhengzhou University, Henan province, in 2007. I was 18, and I did not know anything about it except that my family and friends described the major as "very internationalized".

Now busy hunting for a job, I've found that my Chinese is not as professional as that of students with a Chinese-language major, and my English is not as good as students who majored in English.

But I do want to work as a Chinese teacher. Maybe I will try to apply to private training schools in Beijing.

Li was talking to China Daily reporter Zhang Yue.