Visitors to the Expo 2010 Shanghai (also known as the Shanghai Expo) this summer and fall will find a Jumbo among the guides at the USA Pavilion. Senior Nick Burns will be working as a student ambassador at the Expo, which opened on May 1.
"The idea is there will be a cohort of American students who can speak Chinese [and] who can do the nuts-and-bolts stuff of being tour guides for the guests, who are primarily going to be Chinese," Burns said.
The Expo is built in the model of famed events like the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and the 1964 New York World's Fair.
Burns, a double major in Chinese and International Relations, heard about the opportunity through multiple sources, including a friend and several professors. Though the guides are not paid a regular salary, they are given a living stipend. "I wanted to go back to China. It's hard to go to China for free," Burns said.
Burns became interested in China while living in Taiwan during his senior year of high school and while studying abroad in China in the fall of his junior year at Tufts.
He hopes that working at the pavilion will open doors for him after the Expo. Burns plans to go to graduate school but does not have concrete plans yet.
"My plan right now is to not have a plan, which isn't to say that my plan is to go home and live with my parents indefinitely, but by being in Shanghai at the Expo, hopefully I'll meet businesspeople and politicians, and maybe they'll like me and can give me a job, or I can make connections," Burns said.
The Shanghai Expo, though having gone relatively unpublicized in the United States, has actually cost more for China to put on than the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, costing an estimated $55 billion versus about $40 billion for the Olympics.
Burns acknowledges, however, that in the United States, the Expo is getting nowhere near the amount of publicity that the Olympic Games received. "It seems like Americans are rather jaded to the idea of a world expo. It seems like a product of pre-World War I times," he said.
Burns noted that the United States was one of the last countries to commit to a pavilion at the Expo and is one of the only participating countries unable to use taxpayer money to fund the pavilion. "Saudi Arabia spent billions on their pavilion because they can," Burns said. He credited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with raising funds for the pavilion in a relatively short time frame.
The expo is far more important to China, Burns said. "At an explicit level, it's an opportunity for different countries to take a look at what other countries are doing in terms of a given theme. This year, the theme is ‘Better City, Better Life,'" Burns said. "I think the implicit part is, it's an opportunity for China to do the same thing it did with the Olympics, which is to build up the brand that is China."
