When you think of that old cliche “shop-till-you-drop”, you probably picture upper-middle class Americans racing around shopping malls and outlet centers. 

The numbers certainly support that picture… in 2013 the average American consumer burned through about $53,000.  According to the world bank, American households had spent a whopping $11 trillion on goods and services by the end of the same year. 

So why then are some experts suggesting that China is set to surpass the US household spending in the near future?

The average yearly income of a Chinese household was only a mere $7,600 in 2013; American households earned about $51,000 on average. It seems almost impossible that consumers in the People’s Republic could manage to hit the shops to the tune of  $3.4 trillion.

However, that figure starts to make more sense once you spread it around.  Per-capita in 2013, the average Chinese citizen spent approximately $6,807. That would account for 90% of their income.

More importantly… the growing class of rich Chinese are spending mountains of cash. In a world bank study, researchers found that the top 10% in China is earning nearly 25.5 times more than the bottom 10% of Chinese citizens. In addition, the total income of China’s top 10% is increasing at a rate 58 percentage-points faster than that of their lowliest 10%. 

Should China truly manage to outspend the United States by 2018, it will be because the rich will be shopping and not dropping.

Welcome one and all to today’s game of Geopolitical UltraChess!

For a special treat, this round will be played in the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.  Let’s take a look: 

THE BOARD: South Sudan is an African nation that split from neighboring Sudan by 98% popular vote in 2011. 

The vote itself resulted from a peace deal for a decades-long civil war that left 1.5 million people dead.

THE PLAYERS: South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, accused his vice president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup and fired him in December of 2013.

The two men hail from different ethnic groups with a history intermittent alliance and conflict.

The last year has been a bloody one for the already-hurting nation as political strife whipped anxious ethnic groups into renewed conflict that has displaced 1.5 million people. 

THE TERRAIN: In case the situation was too simple for you, the board is also sticky with three and a half billion barrels of oil, weapons left over from the civil war, and a population almost half of whose members are under the age of fourteen. 

THE OUTCOME: Please forward winning strategies to USDemocrazy, c/o The Internet.

Seriously, though… 

South Sudan is complex, but not hopeless.

Peace talks between Kiir and Machar are set to resume on February 19th.

When they do, onlookers should remember that South Sudan gained independence just three years ago, in a peaceful process that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called

“far from inevitable.”   

If South Sudan can weather this storm, democracy may yet take root. 

The Support Specialist provides support to the Foundation’s general administrative, accounting, grants management, database administration, external affairs, and office operations functions.

Name: Benard Onyango

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Pennsylvania General Energy | Title of Your Position: Software Developer

Major(s)/Minor(s): Information Systems

Expected Graduation Year: Master Student, May 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

I interned at Pennsylvania general Energy as Software Developer. It is such a nice place to work. I particularly enjoyed the friendliness of my fellow programmers. They were very helping in answering any questions that I needed answered. My daily routine began with programming in ASP.NET(C#) using MVC framework.My first assignment was to create of an app for the PGE legal department. In addition, I was also I asked to help with the completion of a web based application which was about 80 % done. Despite some challenges, I really enjoyed my internship. I gained a wealth of knowledge from it.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

A friend of mine told me that there was a position open for software developer intern. I immediately went online to learn something about the company. While I was waiting to hear from them, I spent some time reading about some of the requirements(technologies) for the job that were not very familiar to me. This was very helpful on the day of the interview. Something I would like to mention is that they were asking for 1.5 years of experience to be hired. Even though I did not have that much experience, I did not shy away from applying.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

Network

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

The Employees at PGE were very friendly especially the programming team and my supervisor. They made sure I did the work. However, they were very kind in answering any questions that I may have had.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

By working on real, hands-on project, I was able to gain in the following technologies. - ASP.NET MVC 4 and 5 Framework - Visual Studio 2012 IDE, Entity Framework 5 with Migrations - HTML5, CSS, JavaScript (JQuery and Ajax), GIT Repository Secondly, I build good professional networks that may become relevant especially in my job hunt after graduation.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

My advice would be to make sure you distribute copies of your resume to people. You never know when an opportunity may become available.

Please provide a short reflection or quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

This internship brought the best out me! It taught me that all I needed was an opportunity and a challenge, to fully comprehend my capabilities.

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I decided to do this competition because I it as a chance to practice problem solving and grow a relationship with this company for future employment opportunities. I do not have any entrepreneurial experience and am hoping to gain some through this process. In the future I plan on being an entrepreneur. 

I decided to participate in this competition because it seemed like such an exciting, and fun, opportunity to learn more about intrepreneurship and innovation. Also, I love mascara (which is the specific product that we will be developing); it is literally the single best beauty product in the world!

I have some entrepreneurial experience. In my FYS 102 class, we started a business called LIVE, in which we designed a charm and app to be used to prevent date rape. I am also a consulting intern for a small startup, NK Webb Group. I hope to start my own business. In particular, I would like to open my own yoga studio.

I am honored to be a member of the P&G competition team. I saw it as a great opportunity to represent my University alongside some of the best and brightest minds that our student community has to offer. 

I have a fair amount of entrepreneurial experience, my main projects have been focused on digital application design. I have learned through trial and error that the most efficient way to find success is to exhaust your efforts on only those pursuits that provide an opportunity to leverage a gap in the existing market place. 

I am enamored with the idea of being an entrepreneur mainly due to the degree of freedom that you have when you are your own boss. I am not entirely sure if entrepreneurship is my path, but I do know that I will end up in a profession where I have the capacity to increase my earnings through diligent work and focus.

I decided to do this competition because I love innovation and thinking of new ideas. I get to collaborate with a great group of fellow students.  This is a great opportunity and a chance that I may never have again. 

Last semester I took a FYS course called Creativity, Innovation, and Invention. The purpose of the class was to come up with a product idea and by the end of the semester hopefully take it to market. This experience really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship and invention.

I definitely plan to be an entrepreneur someday. I hope that through engineering I will be able to stay inventive and eventually create something amazing. I hope to change and help the world. With that in mind, I need to be innovative.

As the sidekick of two entrepreneurial parents, I've had the benefit of participating in two start-up businesses for over five years. My mother, a physiologist turned novelist, slowly transformed her writing coaching career into a small, but selective publishing house. Since high school, she's hired me to design book covers, edit back cover copies, and troubleshoot story structure of aspiring manuscripts. Under her mentorship, I adapted her non-fiction book of story structure observations into a concise 16-variable algorithm that could be used as a predictive measure of market success. 

My father is also in the process of transforming a hobby into a side-occupation. A few years ago, he bought me a 3D printer as a Christmas gift while we attended a National Instruments conference, at which my brother and I were giving presentations. Over the next year, I tried to scan objects using Kinect Xbox sensors. For fun, we printed sculptures of our whole family. He began experimenting with ways to post-process the plastic so that it resembles marble, metal, and looks far more expensive than it costs to make. On occasion, he has asked me to apply concepts I’ve learned in fluid mechanics and mechanics of materials to guesstimate his prototype requirements. 

After I complete my chemical engineering background, I hope to contribute to his project ideas by applying concepts from material science to create new, safer materials with which to print. After my brother completes his electrical engineering degree, we plan to all work together to make this technology not only more accessible to medicine, but a common household product.