I received the S&P award for economics and business reporting today in New York City. Feeling very lucky to meet the other 13 Overseas Press Club Foundation scholars, and many experienced foreign correspondents. It is inspiring to meet so many people passionate about overseas reporting, and I am more excited than ever to begin a career in international journalism.

Read more about the program here: http://overseaspressclubfoundation.org/

I recently got to interview Boone County native Jake Adelstein, who has spent most of his career covering organized crime in Japan. He is the first American to work as a Japanese-language journalist for a newspaper in Japan.

The article based on the interview is forthcoming, but for now, I wanted to share a few tips from Adelstein on reporting:

-Journalism classes often focus on technical aspects of the craft, but Adelstein emphasizes forging good relationships with key sources. He says the foremost rule he lives by is to never break a promise to a source.

–Success as a reporter requires immense devotion to your work. Adelstein says he and other Japanese crime reporters spend much of their evenings chatting up police officers for tips.

-Courtesy is important, and the power of a “thank you” should never be underestimated.

During my summer in Beijing, I visited the city outskirts where many recent graduates eke out their existence. Here’s a look into China’s “ant tribes.”

At evening high tide, the Beijing subway becomes a seething mass of workers. Gooey hot fumes of sweat and bodies cascade up the stairwell. Commuters use elbows and any other appendages to wedge themselves into teeming trains.

Among them is recent graduate Feng Biao. During his hour and a half ride home each night, his glittery dream of Beijing dissolves into a pumpkin.

The entrance to Feng Biao’s neighborhood, Shigezhuang, is a dirt path lined with sheet metal and garbage piles. Beyond are layers on layers of cheap housing, some rooms small enough that they barely enclose a cot.

As a recent film animation graduate, Feng earns about 3,000 yuan ($470) a month making pop-up ads in central Beijing, enough to scrape by in his 600-yuan-a-month apartment. By day, he looks out across towering high rises. By evening, the scenery is corrugated metal roofs tamped down with bricks, not nails.

“There are jobs,” Feng says. “But not necessarily the ones you want.”

In 2011, a record 6.6 million Chinese university students graduated. Many of them are finding that the good life they expected, that they were promised, is out of reach.

On one hand, the graduate employment rate is improving: 72 percent last year, up from 68 percent in 2009, according to official figures. But in an economy that skews heavily toward manufacturing, factory owners are complaining that it’s hard to recruit laborers, while graduates are finding there simply aren’t enough professional jobs to go around. Last fall, China’s Ministry of Education acknowledged the problem, announcing plans to cut majors whose graduates struggle to find employment.

In 2010, Chinese graduates averaged monthly salaries of less than 2,500 yuan ($400) a month, including benefits, according to a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This is scarcely better than wages as an uneducated factory worker.

China’s government has combated the issue at the surface level, mindful that dissatisfied youth are a major cause of political unrest. Within the past year, the government ordered the demolition of Tangjialing, a Beijing slum notorious for its high number of young white-collar workers, and outlawed the practice of dividing a single rental room into multiple capsules.

But even government-run newspapers say these measures will likely be ineffective. As long as there is a shortage of good jobs, young graduates will continue swelling the numbers of the “ant tribe.”

Yan Lisha returned to China this year, believing that her master’s in accounting from an Australian university would be a golden ticket. Instead, three months later, the willowy 25-year-old with big square glasses is still jobless, sending out resumes by day and returning to a bunk bed in a youth hostel by night.

“It makes me wonder if my overseas education was all a waste,” she says, as she washed her job interview blouse in the communal sink and hung it off her bunk bed to dry. “After so much schooling, I did not think I’d be living here.”

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

I’ve slept in a lot of strange places this past year. In a snug Brussels flat with infirmary style cots overlooking a clattering cobblestone lane. In a stifling, windowless annex for the length of the sweltering Beijing summer. Folded upon a row of chairs in an Albanian airport, and sprawled on the floor of a Canadian one. On a 24-hour slow train to Hong Kong, where the berths were too low to sit up at more than a 45 degree angle. On a stiff Taipei dorm bunk, the one-inch mattress mitigated by a soft white cocoon of mosquito netting.

Sometimes I’d wake up and wonder what in the world I was doing there — wherever “there” happened to be that day — oceans away from my own cozy bed in Detroit, with the plump pillow and patchwork quilt. How to justify a year spent sleeping in uncomfortable beds? What is gained through travel, in the end? Surely something, but something hard to pin down. Something that can’t be measured through tourist snapshots or clever cocktail party stories.

Returning to Missouri for school, I’m often asked about my year abroad. I usually give the highlights reel version, and tell about what I learned about different cultures. But the reality of travel to me is stranger, more mysterious, almost akin to time travel. In the hazy recesses of my brain, I remember that two weeks ago (two weeks!), my favorite snack was fried seaweed, that I had a habit of carrying an umbrella to fend off drizzles, that the thought of driving on Taipei’s crazy roads scared me to death, and that I loved singing karaoke. Upon waking up back in Missouri, I now recall that my favorite snack has always been Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, that I disdain umbrellas, that I enjoy driving my Jeep, and that I’m a certifiably bad singer.

Do we become someone else when we travel? Do we leave ourselves behind when we return?

Traveling means living an alternative life for a month, a week, a day. Like a newborn baby, you suddenly have no background, no connections, no cultural baggage or expectations. For once you see how little or much of you remains when all of that is gone. This is perhaps why writer Freya Stark once said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

An equally pleasant thing is the realization that however far you go, you are always home — at least someone’s home. Home is bigger than I had imagined, and people more adaptable. Most plants can only thrive in certain climes, and before this year I sometimes wondered if that was the case with me. But in a year of traveling, I’ve learned that humans are made of stretchier, stronger, more mold-able stuff. Much like dandelion seeds, we will take root and flourish wherever luck or happenstance takes us.

I’m Eva. A journalist. Adventurer. Language enthusiast. I believe in the power of words and pictures.