Harvard Girl: Sometimes the Sequel is Better

What would it feel like to be one in a million?  When Zara graduates from Harvard in a few years, she will be one of a literal handful of students from China who earned a spot there. There will be over 7,000,000 students in China graduating at the same time. There have been books that have sold millions of copies from former Harvard students from China. The approach they took was based largely on the parents’ rigorous oversight of every facet of their child’s life. Zara shows that things have changed .The best way to be one in a million now is to follow your own dream.

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Can you tell us where you grew up in China and where you originally went to middle school? Did you find the way you were taught to be in agreement with the stereotype of rote learning or were there classes or teachers who taught you how to learn rather than just Zhongkao prep.

I grew up in Changchun and went to the Middle School Affiliated with Northeast University from 2005-2008. My middle school education was indeed centered on Zhongkao prep. (Parke’s Note: the Zhongkao is the exam students take to get accepted to top high schools in China. In high schools in China the students prepare for the Gaokao, the national exam which makes the SAT look like child’s play, in order to get accepted to top universities in China. The acceptance rate for students getting in to Beida—the Harvard of China- is about 1/7000.)

I come from a cold city 

You spent the last four years of your secondary education in Singapore. Can you describe the application process to become one of the students selected for a scholarship to attend a top school there?

I was in class one day and our teacher announced that a school in Singapore called Raffles was coming to Changchun to recruit students. I had no idea what Raffles was or whether it was a good/trustworthy program, but there was one slide in my teacher’s presentation that showed a news article about how Raffles sends the largest number of students to Ivy Leagues outside of the US. This single fact was enough to convince me that this school was a place that I’d die to go to. I signed up to participate in their recruitment exams. I went through an English exam, a math exam, an IQ exam and an interview. All were conducted in English. I thought I did very poorly on the math exam since math was never my forte, but I was proud of how I did in the English exam and the interview. I was interviewed by the Vice Principal of Raffles Girls’ School and I remember being shocked at his Singaporean accent. Luckily, I understood every word he said and we had a pleasant conversation.

Was it your idea to study in Singapore? Why did you want to leave China?

Yes. My parents had some misgivings because they had never  heard of Raffles until I told them about it and the idea of my going abroad for high school had never been discussed in my family. But I was convinced that this would be the right step for me. It took some persuasion, but my parents eventually let me go. I feel grateful for having understanding parents who always respect my decisions.

The idea of staying in China my whole life has never occurred to me as realistic. Since I was very young, I knew that I was going to go abroad some day to study/work, and it was only a question of when. I never found the need to confine myself within China’s borders. My international-mindedness probably originated from over-exposure to Hollywood films and American sitcoms since a young age. I had this vague notion that people in America lead happy lives and enjoy a better education system.

You attended Raffles JC, the most prestigious school in Singapore and one of the great schools in the world. Can you describe what Raffles is like both from an academic perspective and from a stress perspective?

From an academic perspective, Raffles certainly has one of the most rigorous A Level curriculums in the world. Anything above 70% was counted as an “A”, which may sound easy until you realize that in one of the Economic finals in my senior year, out of 1,000 people who took the exam, about 50 people got an A.

It was a very intellectually stimulating environment because everyone was the top student at their middle schools – it’s sort of the little Harvard of Singapore.

I was under lots of stress most of the time because I tend to make myself work hard. I cared a lot about my grades and literally spent my holidays studying (all exams were conducted after holidays). But I also did lots of things outside classes – I took violin lessons and practiced the violin every day-- performing in front of my friends and schoolmates was really fun.

Do the students from China at Raffles tend to hang out together or is there a lot of interaction between groups? What did you like most about Raffles? Least?

It really is a matter of personal choice. If you are in one of the advanced classes for the sciences, 80% of your classmates will be from China, and sometimes you don’t even need to say a single English word throughout the day. Some of my friends choose to join the Chinese cultural society where everyone is from China. On the other hand, I was the only Chinese student in the Humanities Program, which forced me to interact a lot with local Singaporean students. My extracurriculars (Chamber Ensemble and Students’ Council) also had very few Chinese students, so at school I was almost exclusively interacting with Singaporeans. When I returned at night to my dorm, I got to see my friends from China and catch up with them over meals, because all international students live in the same dorms.

I liked my teachers and classmates in the Humanities Program a lot. I still think applying to HP is the best decision I’ve ever made. I also liked the range of activities that students were able to engage in, and the flexibility in terms of choosing an academic track.

I didn’t like the fact that exams were all after holidays, for obvious reasons.

The class size at the Humanities Program was very small. I’m in the lower row, third from the right

You were enrolled in the Humanities program at Raffles. Can you describe the program and what it was like?

Raffles had special programs for people who wanted a more enriching curriculum in the Sciences/Humanities, and I was lucky enough to be selected for the Humanities Program (HP).

The HP, arguably the most prestigious program at Raffles, counts in its alumni some of Singapore’s most successful statesmen, lawyers, journalists, artists, etc. It was originally established as a feeder program for Singapore’s government. Almost half of all graduates each year move on to Ivy Leagues/Oxbridge. All classes were taught by British expats who are supremely experienced, and they also happened to be some of the most warm-hearted human beings I’ve ever met.

Students are required to take 3 classes in the Humanities (including English Literature) and one contrasting subject, which is usually math. So no one learnt anything about Physics/Biology/Chemistry. I chose to do English Literature, Geography, Economics and Math.

I was very worried when I first learnt that I was going to be enrolled in HP, because I knew nothing whatsoever about English Literature and didn’t know how I was going to cope with this subject as a non-native speaker. But it turned out to be fine, partly because I put in significantly more time and effort than my peers, partly because I had extremely supportive and encouraging teachers.

My friends and teacher from the Humanities Program and I (second from left), during our Humanities trip to Bhutan (in Bhutanese costume)

What made you decide to pursue university in the US? How did you decide which schools to apply to?

Like many innocent Chinese children, I was brainwashed by the book “Harvard Girl” at a tender age. (Note by Parke: The book "Harvard Girl" first published in 2000, detailed how a family prepared their daughter to get accepted to Harvard. It sold millions of copies. It still is read by many today. It describes parental intervention that has since been given the designation-- Tiger Mom.)

My parents would often exclaim how the top colleges in the world were all in the US, and Peking University and Tsinghua trailed miserably behind these ancient institutions of learning. I wanted to go to the best schools in the world, and so by logic I should try to go to the US by all means. When I arrived at Raffles and heard tales of hordes of people getting into Ivy Leagues schools, I was exhilarated because this is essentially what I came to Raffles for. Studying in the US was no longer a distant dream – it became a very real possibility.

Raffles only allowed each student to apply to 8 colleges in the US. Having done well in my final exam, I was in high spirits and so applied to 6 near-impossible schools (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell). I also applied to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and Tufts. My process of school-choosing was hardly the exemplar that everyone should learn from. My logic was this: I wanted to give a shot to all Ivy Leagues, but that would be too risky, so let’s take out 3 of them and replace them with less selective schools. Columbia has a nice focus on the Arts, and my boyfriend was at Cornell, so I kept these two and took out the rest. Mom insisted that I should try Stanford, so I put Stanford on the list. Georgetown’s SFS was my ideal medium-risk school, and Tufts was a nice low-risk school since at that time I wanted to do International Relations.

I also applied to Oxford University’s PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) program as a Plan B in the case where I get rejected by all American schools. In the end, I was accepted into Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown’s SFS and Oxford.

The HP teachers would regularly bring us to cultural events in Singapore (eg. Concerts, plays, Shakespeare in the park). My classmates and I after a concert (I’m third from right)

You talked about how your counselor advised you to think of yourself as an exotic animal when applying to schools. Can you talk a little about this and about how you did this?

The “exotic animal” comparison was one of the most important things I learnt from my advisor, and it made a lot of sense. Basically, when Admission Officers in American colleges are looking at the pool of international students, they are looking to recruit students who can help diversify the incoming class by being dramatically different from the American students. So as international applicants, we should market ourselves as “exotic”, i.e. having very different cultural background and experiences than the typical American applicant. I tried to achieve this effect by highlighting the fact that I grew up in a city that most Americans have never heard of, the fact that English is not my first language, and the fact that my family had a rural background one generation ago.

You were one of 9 students from all of China accepted to Harvard. I am not sure how to say this any other way, but what made you so special?

I was lucky because I went to Raffles, a school that historically has been consistently feeding students to Harvard and other Ivy League schools. American colleges trust its transcripts and recommendations, and the admission officers know the value of an “A” at Raffles is different from the value of an “A” in, say, a Chinese high school that they’ve never heard of. As a result, my straight “A”s at Raffles probably appeared impressive, given the fact that I was the only straight-A student in the Humanities Program that year, and that I also happened to be the only student in the program whose first language was not English. Choosing to do Humanities itself was a brave decision that no Chinese student at Raffles had attempted, and the colleges perhaps appreciated my willingness to challenge myself and step out of my comfort zone.

I also did the usual stuff that makes a student “well-rounded”: music (I played the violin in Singapore National Youth Orchestra), community service (I initiated a service program in China), leadership (I was a student councilor), etc.

I think another thing that many students neglect but can actually make or break your college application is “whether you are nice to people”. If you are nice to your teachers, they will write splendid recommendation letters. If you are nice to your counselor, he/she will put more effort into helping you. If you are nice to your friends and classmates, they will give you more constructive feedback on your personal essays. Common App doesn’t have a box for “personality”, but it’s really reflected all over the place in an indirect way.

A note from a student who participated in our service project in China, which seeks to empower students with rural backgrounds. It says that she wanted to drop out of school until she learnt the importance of education in one of the lessons we were giving.

You decided not to use a private counselor when applying to schools. And yet so many in China pay huge sums to get help with applications. Did you feel pressured to use private counseling and why did you decide to forgo this common approach?

I didn’t feel pressured into using private counseling because it never occurred to me as necessary. My Chinese schoolmates who used it didn’t talk about it, and I never heard of such thing until my parents called one day and said “your schoolmate so-and-so is using so-and-so agency in China”. I felt very surprised. I thought that if dozens of Singaporeans students at Raffles could make it to Ivy Leagues each year, presumably without help from private counselors, what makes us Chinese students different from them? I also felt that since our transcripts and recommendations were fixed, the only malleable thing that the counselor would be able to help me with is my essay, and I was confident enough in my English language ability to craft my own essay. Lastly, I don’t think my family could have afforded to hire the counselors that my friends were hiring. (Parke’s Note: the cost for top level private counseling in China is approximately $30,000.)

You are now in your first year at Harvard. Can you talk a bit about the transition to Harvard? Has it been harder or easier than you thought? Are the academics what you thought they’d be? What about the social life?

Transitions are never easy, but my transition to Harvard was made easier by the fact that it’s not my first time dealing with a new environment. When I first arrived in Singapore in 2008, that was pretty tough because it was my first time living outside of China in a non-Chinese speaking environment. Having overcome those challenges in Singapore, I found it easier to gather the equanimity to confront new challenges that I faced at Harvard. Basically, Singapore taught me that whenever you’re feeling uncomfortable/displaced/lost, you are learning some important lessons about life, and this is good for you.

In terms of academics, the classes per se are all very manageable; the tricky part is juggling classes with several extracurriculars + social life + random events + maintaining a good relationship with family and friends + adjusting to a different culture + figuring out what to do in the summer… You get the point. It’s hard to maintain focused concentration when you have ten other things on your mind.

For social life, I’ve found it easier to make friends with random people as I spend more people at Harvard, just because we have more things to talk about. Every day I’m meeting some new people, which is exciting because everyone at Harvard is so interesting to talk to and has their own opinions on everything. There are other days when I feel more anti-social and just wanna do my own work. It depends on the degree of stress I’m under. I try to keep a balance between academic and social life.

My roommates and I

Do you have a favorite class or professor? Do you go talk to your teachers?

I’m taking a class called “Asia in the Making of the Modern World” taught by Professor Kuriyama. He was born in Japan but went to boarding school in the US and attended Harvard. After graduating from here he was an acupuncturist for 3 years. He is now one of the world’s foremost expert in the history of medicine.

Talking to professors is something that I started doing this semester because whenever I meet Harvard alumni I would ask them “What do you wish you had done (but didn’t do) when you were at Harvard”, and invariably they would tell me “I wish I had gone to professors’ office hours more.” So I started googling my professors’ names and realized how cool they actually all are, and I even started buying their books. I went to Professor Kuriyama’s office hour with no particular question in mind – I just wanted to hear more about his experiences, and it turns out that he was very willing to talk about it and gave me advice on life in general. I think most professors at Harvard are very happy to “just chat” with students, and I certainly will strive to make better use of office hours in my next 3 years here. Harvard has a lot of “latent resources” waiting to be exploited, and being proactive can make such a difference in one’s experience here.

You are a reporter for the Harvard Crimson. How did you go about becoming a reporter?

Whoever wants to become a reporter can join the “comp” process (which involves writing 10 articles in one semester), and whoever finishes the process will becomes a staff writer. I’m currently in the process of finishing my “comp”.

Would you be willing to share the links to some of your stories? Do you have any you want to highlight?  

http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/1210954/Zara__Zhang/

The article on Yo-Yo Ma was my best reporting experience so far because I was a big fan and never imagined that I would actually talk to him in person.

You have said that you have learned more in some ways outside of class than in. What did you mean by this and could you give a couple of examples?

For example, to write my articles for The Crimson I need to do lots of interviews with many cool people who are really inspiring, and talking to people is where I learn the most from. Volunteering for Small Claims Advisory Service allows me to get out of the Harvard bubble once in a while and listen to real people’s real problems. Organizing Harvard China Forum teaches me how to market an event effectively.

There are untold numbers of students from China who would love to be at Harvard. Do you have any advice about the best way to prepare to stand out among so many outstanding students?

The best way to increase your chance of getting into Harvard is to leave China as early as possible. Going to high school in the US, Singapore, or other countries can significantly enhance your portfolio as someone with international experience and the ability to function in an English-speaking environment. Also, if you are 100% determined to go abroad, preparing for the Zhongkao and Gaokao is a waste of time. Use that time to improve your English instead. (This is essentially what I did in middle school – I never paid attention during my English classes and always used that time to memorize SAT vocabulary).

Of course, going abroad for high school is not a financially viable option for most families (I was lucky because I got a scholarship from Singapore’s government, but they are giving it to fewer and fewer Chinese students now than they used to). Even if you go to a local high school in China, you are by no means doomed – there are a few students admitted from local high schools each year. I think the best way to prepare is to start preparing early. It’s never too early to start preparing, because it takes more preparation than you think. Let’s say you start planning in your first year of high school. This means that you have 3 years to obtain native proficiency in English, to prep for and take the SATs and the TOEFL, to brush up your extracurriculars and try to obtain a leadership position of some sort. All of these things are the products of long-term investment and cannot be achieved in a matter of months. Excelling in the SAT doesn’t take New Oriental – it takes years of patient learning and practice in the English language. (Parke’s note: New Oriental is the largest test prep company in China. They have many years of experience preparing students for standardized testing. They hold summer boot camps for students which involves 14 hours or so of test prep per day.)  Similarly, excelling in your extracurriculars requires that you invest significant time and energy in a particular activity from early on. There’s no shortcut to boost your resume.

Lastly, I can’t stress enough how important proficiency in English can be. Harvard hardly admits anyone whose English language ability is not on par with a native speaker, and the same applies to all international students. Don’t restrict yourself to what you are learning in the classroom. Even if you score full mark in the Gaokao in English, your English is about the same level as an American 6-grader if you don’t do any extra self-learning beyond the Gaokao content. So go beyond that – read the New York Times, The Economist, watch American films and TV, learn English songs, talk to native speakers… Do everything you can to boost your linguistic ability. At the end of the day, when everyone has perfect transcripts and SAT scores, what makes you stand out is your personal essay, and your English language ability is THE most important factor that can make or break your essay. Without the linguistic ability, you will be severely handicapped in expressing who you are as a person.

The number of drafts that I went through for my essay

In some ways you represent that incredible changes that have happened in China over 3 generations. Can you talk about about how your grandfather was a farmer  and then your father then went to university and you are now at Harvard? In some ways this embodies what a lot of people used to call the American Dream. Should the dream be renamed, as there are so many in China now who have stories about the rapid transformation in their lives?

All my relatives on my father’s side still live in the countryside, and my father was the first one to make it into college in the history of his village. I remember that when I shared the news of my admission to Harvard with my relatives there, they asked: “What is Harvard? Is it even better than Peking University?”

I think the irony is that in this age, in order to realize the “Chinese dream”, you have to realize the “American dream” first. Our leaders who coined the phrase “Chinese dream” are the very same people who are sending their sons and daughters to Ivy Leagues for an American education. I think this says something about our education system.

In terms of social mobility, China has certainly made vast improvements in the past few decades, but inequality still abounds. Let’s say you are born in a remote village in China. By sheer hard work, you may be able to make it into a top university in China, but going abroad would still be out of reach because you simply lack the resources and the exposure.

You are still early on in your academic career but do you have any short or long term goals in terms of career?

My short term goal is to find out what my long term goal is. I take college as an opportunity to explore what I love and what is suitable for me, and at this stage I’m still trying out various different things.

How do you think you have changed since coming to Harvard and the US?

I’ve become more engaged with the world. I’m now more interested in everything around me; I’m eager to learn about people’s experiences; I have a hundred books that I want to read and a thousand subjects that I’d love to explore. Everything just seems more interesting than it was before.

What do you do for fun?

I shop more than I should, I explore restaurants and eateries around Cambridge and Boston, I talk with friends, and I make my own clothes.

Could you take us through a typical day for you at Harvard from the time you get up to the time you go to bed?

So this was how I spent one of my Saturdays:

10:00-11:00 Tour-guided a group of high school students from China around Harvard

11:00-1:00 Volunteer for Small Claims Advisory Service (a service organization where volunteers provide legal information to people who need help filing small claims cases)

 1:00-3:00 Lunch with friends from Mt Holyoke

3:00-5:00 Catch up with work

5:00 Dinner with host family

6:30-9:30 Cover a concert for The Crimson

10:00 onwards: Stay over at a Wellesley friend’s place

This semester I have a beautiful schedule because I only have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means I get a 4-day weekend every week. Somehow I find myself busier on weekends than weekdays with all kinds of engagements. Boston is, in my opinion, one of the greatest places on earth to go to college because of the sheer number of schools and the resulted synergy. On weekends I often have friends from nearby schools visiting me, which is really fun.

From talking to you I think its clear you love to learn. How do you think your parents and schools instilled what I think of as a great gift?

The most impressive thing that my parents were able to do (and most Chinese parents aren’t like this) was doing nothing. They really took on a laissez faire approach and just let me do whatever I saw fit. So in high school, I got to choose what I liked to learn (Humanities) and enjoyed it a lot. Because I enjoyed it, I put more time into studying. Because I spent more time studying, I did well in those subjects, which in turn made me enjoy learning them more. This is a powerful virtuous cycle, and I think the key to getting it rolling is encouragement and positive messages from parents and teachers. Also, I think parents should encourage their children to be curious about things, even though those things might appear “useless” in the immediate term (i.e. not tested in the Gaokao).

Do you have anything else you want to add?

Before college, we tend to treat college as the end goal in life, and after-college feels like an afterlife. But I’ve realized that college is really the start of things, and getting into a good college is by no means a guarantee that one will achieve great things in life. Different colleges may represent different starting points, but some people still run faster than others. I know in the post-admission season, all this sounds like empty consolation for a heart broken by rejection letters, but it is important to put things into perspective. At the end of the day, drive and passion matter far more than where one’s degree is from.

My Family

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Zara’s words should be read not just by the many in China who hope to get into great universities in the US, but by anyone hoping to learn how to learn. What she said bears repeating: “I take college as an opportunity to explore what I love.” Many college presidents, professors, and educators would find this sentence music to their ears. Zara’s loved to learn from an early age. For those who are wired like her, parents should permit their children to explore, to find paths that will take them to new places, mentally and physically too. Zara’s an intrepid explorer. She takes risks but also makes music, cloths and many friends wherever she goes. She’s also smart, not just in taking tests (although she’s clearly very good at that too); she knows the secret to success isn’t a secret and it isn’t the name of a school. Once again her words bear repeating: “At the end of the day, drive and passion matter far more than where one’s degree is from.” Zara’s a Harvard girl because she knows that Harvard isn’t the destination that people should set out to conquer. It’s the mental landscape of imagination and passion and drive that will open up opportunities anywhere.

I have been lucky to talk to Zara about a number of things, some of them serious and some of them fun, all them enlightening. I use this last word on purpose. Her words really do help define what some have called ‘’the lightness of being’. She’s taught me a lot and I think anyone reading her words will agree with me that she’s far more than an ‘exotic animal’. She’s an international treasure. I am grateful for her willingness to share her experiences here. I look forward to reading more about her. Soon I think she won’t just be writing stories about the likes of Yo Yo Ma; others will be asking to interview her.