NYUSH: The Good, The Bad, The (Almost) Impossible

New York University Shanghai — the place where people come on full-rides; the place where there is a bubble of people who understand each other; the place where people make mistakes. Above all, NYU Shanghai is the place where people come together. Despite all of the differences and adversities in this world, when times get tough, everyone comes together.
NYU Shanghai changed my life. It showed me what it was like to be a person from a privileged, upper middle class family that had the ability to pay for school. It showed me who my true friends are. It taught me about language, culture and everything in between. These are things learned through time and experience.
Over the past four years, I was thrust into a world that I had never seen before. Never once did I think I would be THAT person, the one who would have the guts to leave America and study abroad in China for what would be 20% of my life. That’s one-fifth — that’s insane. My 17-year-old self decided to venture out into a new place, with no prior experience or memories of it. All I had were stories, Hollywood, and stereotypes.
Adjusting to life in China wasn’t as hard as it could’ve been. I already knew a decent amount of Mandarin Chinese. I blended into the environment, with the occasional stares because I was speaking English. I was the translator for my new friends who didn’t know Chinese. I was able to practice my Chinese and converse with the locals on the streets, improving my overall comprehension and conversational abilities. Socially, China did well for me.
Academics were a different story. In China, NYU is one of the most well known, non-Ivy League, American universities. Thus, when NYU Shanghai is in the mix, you are going to get the best and brightest students from China, not including the international and American students. Factor every nationality into it and you have a pool of ridiculously intelligent, courageous, ambitious, and friendly people all in the same school. I don’t want to stereotype, but Chinese kids are smart, especially in math. They dominated every class and made the rest of us international and American students look terrible on paper. We knew we weren’t stupid, but if you look at it all holistically, my goodness, we were at the bottom. The grades we all saw and were used to through high school were even harder to achieve and it wasn’t because we were slacking off — we just couldn’t keep up a lot of the time. Whether it was a curve or just hard material, we could never seem to break middle ground. The self-esteem declined significantly and we were left to wonder if we really were meant to be there.
Nevertheless, through all of this, we were still in it, together. So many of our days were filled with classes, meetings, exams, and endless hours in the library or study rooms, trying to figure out how to tackle the abundance of information in an efficient, but effective manner. Many study sessions were held just because we didn’t understand what was going on. Imagine if we had breezed through the lectures and understood them like every other Chinese student… this reflection would be completely different.
I’m not complaining about the inequality of academics or the fact that I had it easier when I lived in Shanghai. There were so many trade-offs. I discovered my love for traveling over the four years and was given so many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to do so. I realized that Shanghai had become yet another home for me and as hard as it was to leave, I knew I would eventually be back. I had the opportunity to take piano lessons again and re-found my love for piano and music. I was able to contribute to bridging the gap between the Chinese and international/American students in the student body. I had the privilege of playing piano at many of the school’s events, one of the most memorable being the 88 上海 Countdown in March 2017. I was given more opportunities for auditions, regardless of whether or not I was granted a position. These are just a few of the good things. The list goes on and on…
But one of the things I cherish the most from this experience is the people. Whether they were my best friends, close friends, acquaintances, professors, administration, or people I merely said hi to, I couldn’t have done it without the NYU Shanghai community. Yes, my family was right there and the more I fought to stay at the school my freshman year, the more they recognized that it was a great opportunity (I hope). But aside from the family you’re born into, you get to choose any other family you want to be a part of. I gained a family from gymnastics and now I have a third family through NYU Shanghai. With a little less than 300 students in the Class of 2017, I have a family of over 1000 people — parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, and of course, my fellow classmates and the school.
This family has made my time at NYU Shanghai both easier and harder, but the hardest thing I’ve had to do in the past 4 years there is graduate with them. Like any other family, you know you’ll see many of them again and some quite soon, but this time was different. Graduation was the last time we’d all be in the same room, at the same time, together. When is that ever going to happen again?
I still can’t put into words what it feels like to be a NYU Shanghai alum, but I know the nostalgia is already real (and it’s only been 2 months since commencement). NYU Shanghai made my life better, in all aspects, but it also made it worse knowing that many of my closest friends aren’t merely a metro ride away anymore. I know I’ll see them again sometime in the near future and I know this world is a lot smaller than it really is, but it really does feel like I have a piece of me everywhere in the world and I’m looking forward to slowly putting them back into place.
