Make the Most of College
Life
From
my personal point of view, a college or university is the place to embrace a
wide variety of opportunities, to make your own choices, and to make the most
out of them. Colleges and Universities in the U.S. have nearly innumerable
resources to facilitate inspiration and creativity.
As
an international student coming directly from a traditional Chinese high
school, I started exploring my college life outside of class by becoming
involved immediately in the Asian community at my research university. As there
are over 20,000 students on campus, this helped me to learn from mentors and
new friends who share my culture and language. Several days before my first
semester began, I made quite a few Asian friends who shared the same interest
in classical Chinese musical instruments.erhu I personally play the Erhu, a bowed instrument
that produces a beautiful sound that many Westerners have not heard.
In
addition, I found students interested in the fields of global development, and
environmental awareness, by going to the “activities fair”, which exhibited various
student organizations within the university. With some of these friends, I
co-founded a student organization at the beginning of my freshman year, to
promote a better understanding of the Tibetan Plateau. With some other friends,
I became part of a group of music lovers who are now also very close friends. We
gather to screen films, recruit members, applying for funding to perform
concerts, learn networking and outreach skills, and create publicity campaigns
to advertise our music. Each of these activities permitted me to learn lots of new
skills that are applicable to my future career and my life too. Even if some of
our efforts are not completely successful, I learn from them. New challenges
mean new ways of seeing the world; after
all, even a failure is a way of learning and growing as a person.
Through
my various activities, meeting new people of various backgrounds has been particularly
educational. From a Chinese cultural organization, I had many interactions with
graduate students and was very inspired by their academic passion as well as
overall maturity; from a leadership institute for selected freshman and
sophomore students, I was both educated and inspired; from tutoring at
elementary schools, I got to know student peers with the same love and care for
the local community; from my language partners, I played snooker, and tennis (for
the first time), and roasted my first American dish. Studying in a foreign
country is sometimes perceived as a lonely experience, which, I think, is not
accurate for me, partly because I am a person who is self-motivated and willing
to reach out, and partly because I did make an effort to finds friends during my
first semester. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that I can learn
something from everyone I meet, and I think everyone who meets me can learn
something too.
Not
only have I tried a range of activities, I have also enrolled in many different
types and levels of courses. I am majoring in economics and environmental
sciences. The faculty, in particular, has played an important role in mentoring
and motivating me to take on significant opportunities and challenges. For
example, I took a microeconomics taught by Dr. Federico Ciliberto who impressed
me with his sharp mind and very passionate and effective teaching. I started to
consider economics as something I wanted to know more about rather than just something
I was supposed to learn. Also, I was inspired by his emails encouraging me to consider
doing research in economics. But my passion has always been to learn how to
solve environmental problems. I took the introductory course and quickly moved
on to doing research. And I am very thankful for the significant encouragement from
my research supervisors, each of whom gave me endless support.
Getting
involved in research is not as hard as one might assume. Simply knocking on a
professor’s (or a graduate student’s) door or emailing them your interests is
often sufficient, as long as you demonstrate your eagerness to learn and to help.
I have always cherished my first research experience, during my second year, in
an atmosphere science lab with Dr. Stephan de Wekker and his Ph. D. student
Temple Lee. I gained experience with ‘hobo sensors,’ and got to climb a
meteorology tower on a mountaintop. More importantly, I learned that successful
scientific research requires passion and perseverance as well as relentless effort.
My particular obsession with research in hydrology was nurtured by my
supervisor, Dr. Matthew Reidenbach. Thanks to the stipend from the Science
Scholars program, I started my distinguished major program in the summer before
my senior year, focusing on the topic of how coastal hydrodynamics potentially
impacts coral reefs under global warming. Attracted by the topic and inspired
by the guidance and huge encouragement from my supervisor, I would not feel satisfied
every day unless I spent some time working on my lab room computer.
Still,
with everything there is to do, it is not uncommon in college that things may
go wrong from time to time. And I would like to end with my favorite quote: “don’t
sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small stuff”.
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Here is the link to Angang's musical performance
canon
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| Thales |
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