Natalie Young

Natalie A.E. Young is a Ph.D student within the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.  After completing a B.A. at Dartmouth College in 2010 (Majors: Anthropology and Government), she spent three years in China. Sponsored by a James B. Reynolds Scholarship for Foreign Study, she studied Mandarin full-time at Tsinghua University.  She spent the following two years working as a Social Studies, Literature, and Media Studies teacher at an offshore Canadian high school in Beijing. Close interactions with her students, who were primarily Chinese nationals, continued to pique her interest in Chinese society.  Coursework in Government has supplied her with a strong background in Chinese politics, economics, and society.  Her methodological training has been rigorous in both ethnographic and qualitative techniques. Her honors thesis was based on three months of research including focus groups, interviews, and surveys.  Additionally, in summer 2007, she participated in North Carolina State University’s Ethnographic Field School.  While interning at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research during summer 2009, she acquired additional skills in qualitative coding and analysis.  In terms of quantitative methods, she completed coursework in statistics as an undergraduate and is currently enrolled in a graduate-level, two-semester course in quantitative methods.  She continues to develop her Chinese language skills, and is currently enrolled in Advanced Spoken Mandarin at Penn.  Her research interests include nationalism, the social construction of race, urban youth, and the internationalization of education in contemporary China.