My Journey at DKU

Meredith Li is a senior student at Sichuan University in China. Her passion is creating an educational environment so that language learning never has to stop growing.
I have always had a keen sympathy for people’s strong desire to become multilingual and their consequent frustration by lack of teaching resources in trying to achieve that goal. Because of this sympathy, and my desire to change this situation, I have long wanted to be a teacher myself to help my students achieve their dreams. 

Duke Kunshan University (DKU) has provided me with an opportunity to optimize my time and a more efficient way to realize my dream. The professors at DKU were extraordinary teachers and leaders in their fields. On top of that, smaller class sizes, guest lecturers, live teleconferences with experts, and field trips made DKU an unparalleled experience. What was more, faculty mentors (particularly Professor Vicki Russell and Andrew Byers) offered helpful suggestions to prepare for graduate school, and Edie Allen, my EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instructor, gave me so much useful advice in pursuing meaningful professions. Even though I was faced with so much pressure and so many bewildering choices in the graduation year, I’ll always look back on my time at DKU as a memorable journey. 

However, what I learned at DKU spanned far beyond my personal academic improvement. DKU serves more as a place that shaped my future path than merely an exchange experience. My stay there greatly encouraged me to pursue the path of teaching further, and inspired me to utilize and integrate global educational resources throughout my hard work. During the service learning project in my writing seminar with Professor Vicki Russell, we “student-teachers” went to Canadian International School (an affiliated school with St. John’s Kilmarnock School in Ontario, Canada) in Kunshan to teach 3rd and 4th graders art class.

Here, I was offered an opportunity to experiment with different teaching methods with different groups of students, and more importantly, from the perspective of Sino-US cultural perspectives, and this formed the core of my stay at DKU. Looking back now, several meaningful experiences stand out clearly from my memories in China.

The first was simply watching the transformation my student Tom went through. Tom was a transfer student at the Canadian International School who barely knew English at the beginning of this semester. He was painfully shy and not willing to communicate with anyone. During the first six weeks, we all tried lots of ways to boost his confidence. Later, we found that he was in fact a very smart student who always got top scores in math and science exams. He had a very neat and succinct manner. My friends and I thought that he would be a great scientist, but no one told him, because in China, it would be quite inappropriate to praise a person, especially a young person. If we praise someone, the fear is that the person will be haughty. 

Consequently, I kept my thoughts on Tom and his progress in my heart for a long time, until one day, I had a casual conversation with a fellow student, Vicki, and she encouraged me to be open with my praise for him. She told me how praises work in a child’s development in American culture. So I did as she asked, but I did not realize the full impact of such praise until the last week of my semester at DKU, when Tom gave me a postcard with the following written on it: “I can be a scientist (he still misspelled scientist, though) Thank you, and I miss you.” I was of course surprised, but it was at that moment that I realized that I just want to be a teacher as well as researcher, studying children’s behavioral psychology and devising curriculums to improve their educational prospects and their social life. I realized that teachers can mean so much to their students. Even your one-sentence-praise can affect them, as it affected Tom.

Second - more a realization than a memory - is how DKU has also shaped my academic choices. The university I originally graduated from in China is amongst the top 10 nationwide, but it is by no means the best one. You may have heard of China’s cruel college entrance examination system where the future path of a student is completely decided by this one exam [the GaoKao]. When I first took it I was not at my best, and fell short of being admitted to my dream school by a mere three points! I was faced by two choices: either retake the 12th grade and take the exam again, or simply chose another university based on the grades I got. But that extra year seemed like a very, very long at the time, so I just went to another university. 

I was pretty satisfied with my choices there, and I generally did well. That is, I was until I came to DKU, where most people surrounding me are the best in their fields. The students I met were academically outstanding yet humble in person, and yet at the same time almost all of them had big dreams. I used to be the model of my classmates, but here at DKU, I was surrounded by “life-winners” all the time. I learned so many things from them. I used to think that I should never stay up late, or I would get pimples in my face and that’s not good for my health. But my roommate Cathy never goes to bed before 2:00 am. She eventually won admission from a very good university through her dedicated studying. I used to think that an academic advisor was just a title and had no authentic use (because at my Chinese university, I’d only ever met mine once: during the opening ceremony and never heard from her again). DKU confirmed for me that at the schools that really are the best, professors can be your friends, advisors really help you, and you can really talk and communicate with them, even during leisure time (like playing table tennis). 

So I would say I definitely changed my pre-DKU way of thinking. I’m now applying to some great U.S. universities, to get myself more competitive, to meet more successful people and listen to their ideas, learn from them, and more importantly, to better myself.