Prior to setting foot on the man-made island that I would know as my school for the next three years, I had expectations for the future that were both clear-cut and completely mystifying. Being the youngest child of three, my elder siblings had more than enough achievements for my parents to congratulate, and they themselves were more than loving enough to be proud of whatever high school life I would lead, coming to UWC. 

It would be different from what I was used to, for sure. No longer surrounded by the familiar Shenzhen skyline or the faces I had grown used to at my previous school, I came to UWC complacent to do as well as I could. Not chasing greatness or excellence, per se, but to shoot my best shot—a type of good-enough that my teenage self thought fitting to the architecture of the school that I deemed lacklustre. From my first moment here to my last, the only thing that would remain consistent would be my decision to study architecture.

The earlier months of my FP year were, for lack of a better word, torturous. The view of the Kuncheng Lake at the Yushan Academy accompanied me on late-night stare-outs, lit windows in the buildings across the lake staring back at me. I did not enjoy the change as I had thought I would. It was not the classes nor the dorms, not teachers or hard assignments. Still, in moments where I doubted staying for the subsequent years or felt all but glad to be here, it was the people I met that ultimately lulled me into staying. 

The homely A3 Bari Common Room, occasionally made even warmer by the baked goods or snacks that our HoH Nian would surprise us with, existed as my respite. Friends were made singing along, off-key, to guitar-playing, and also made likewise arguing over keyboard-clicking over whatever game fancied our interest. These friends were the ones I would grow familiar with over the next two years, and when thinking back of my time at UWC, it is their faces I remember before the sterile grey buildings I spent time with them in.

My House Bari

The assurance of the friends I made and the uncritical attitude of my classmates led to me even running for College Council in my first semester of FP year. Speaking of a pipe dream promise to add microwaves to the common rooms, being selected was above my expectations and a little taste of what was to come. 

It was a testament to how much I had changed, or grown, since initially setting foot on this island, from someone comfortable in merely their own skin to someone willing to be a voice for their classmates. Working in the College Council would offer ample challenge to myself in communicating the complex needs of the student body to an equally complex line of procedures for the sake of making changes around campus. 

Though my first year on the College Council was spent learning more than anything, the planning, communication, and logistical skills I first came across here would flourish in the coming years.

Introducing the activities on Earth Day 

Overall, still, my time in FP was extremely different from my DP years. Taking FP Visual Arts (VA) was certainly a choice, and my time taking VA was just as enjoyable as I had thought when choosing the course, but also just as challenging to prove fair all the agony DP VA students were filled with. I enjoyed learning about impressionist painters, such as Monet, and saw my own background interest in architecture as the chance to better integrate classic arts into the technical arts. 

Of course, mathematics acts as a basis for all art, proved undoubtedly by even rudimentary, well-known concepts such as the rule of thirds, linear perspective, the golden ratio, and so on and so forth. Blending together the perceived line between practical studies of maths and science with art was what birthed fields of studies such as architecture. 

Design Technology class

Towards the end of my time in the Foundation Program, a student in DP1 also reached out to me to found an art Zhi Xing focused on studio arts, and the latter half of my year spent online due to COVID was filled with proposal-writing and organising the proposed timeline of activities in the coming year for Atelier. 

After growing familiar with the campus, it was incredible to imagine that I would no longer be part of the newest batch of recruits, but instead someone to help ease others in the transition. 

On top of that, I was also in the process of proposing my own architecture Zhi Xing, run by me and another friend who shared my interests and hoped to focus on teaching 3D modelling and prompting other students with artistic and practical skills to apply their talents functionally in building and designing spaces. Both Zhi Xing proposals passed, and left me both excited and nervous to begin the DP program. 

One of my architecture portfolio piece

A running joke among my friends is that Max Pfingsten’s philosophy class was what granted me consciousness, and thus my subsequent personhood. While that may be a slight exaggeration, it is no doubt that my DP courses were all extremely fruitful in challenging me and pushing me beyond my limits to surpass both the expectations I had of myself and the wildest dreams my parents had, sending me here. With the engaging classes, supportive teachers, and witty peers in every subject, the class was always more of an engagement than a chore. 

In philosophy, we learned about the big-name philosophers that one would expect from such a course: Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kant, Locke, Hobbes…the list goes on and on. Still, the core of the course was not based on us memorising the thoughts of great thinkers, but on learning how to truly think for ourselves. 

With my Philosophy teacher Max and my classmates

A rudimentary skill, one may think, but just as the FP Peace and Sustainability course taught us to think of stakeholder maps, IB philosophy ground into me the importance of understanding causation and implications in any argument. Rather than simply going by gut feeling, analysing the intricacies of what is brought up in class debates by the opposition and by even your own side becomes second nature. 

We not only learned of the theories and beliefs of renowned philosophers, but were taught to criticise them, to disassemble their ideas and improve upon them, to evaluate the feasibility of their words in modern-day circumstances. 

If there were a single course I would urge any incoming student to consider when selecting their IB classes, this would be it. The discussions to be had, with yourself in written paper or with peers in spoken form, are indispensable, with every success a worthy one and every failure an incredible learning opportunity.

Simultaneously, while balancing the new workload of my DP courses, I also participated in CTB (China Thinks Big) with a select few of my classmates, working to solve the accessibility crisis we noticed in our local community. With my forte for design and also experience with coding, the similar interests and skill sets within the group led us to focus on creating an algorithm that would allow the generation of accessibility ramps. 

The level of technical skill would be feasible for a group of high school students with zero funding, but the solution itself also truly offers a resolution to our problem. Our submission succeeded in entering the second round, albeit we were not able to participate in the finale due to conflicting schedules with our end-of-year exams. My summer was also spent sharpening the report we had written for the competition into a full-length paper with one peer and a supervisor, Brandon Yeo, who was both my advisor and a teacher in the science department. 

This paper would go on to secure wins in the S.T. Yau High School Science Award and be published in Cornell’s arXiv e-print archive, through a long series of reformatting, pitches to professors, and changes in citation. 

My Paper

Working on this paper and the process of seeing it published in journals was one of the first periods in my life where I finally proved to myself that I could excel beyond the limits of UWC’s campus and that the education and opportunities granted to me within these walls have prepared me exceptionally well for the world beyond them. 

The ‘me’ who had set foot, initially, planning to go to UBC or the University of Toronto to study back in Canada, had transformed into someone who was finally convinced that aiming my shot beyond my comfort zone could perhaps reap rewards greater than imagined.

DP2 year was, by all means, a flurry of meeting deadlines for DT IAs and EEs and college applications and planning for Zhi Xing sessions. The package-sorting system and new takeout shelves that greeted the DP1s and FPs as they set foot on campus were the fruit of my efforts with the College Council for the last year, and having to select new leaders to take on the mantle of the three Zhi Xings I founded seemed almost surreal, seeing that I still felt as if the first-ever session held was last week.

The first round of college decisions came out with a discouraging deferral from my ED school, Cornell, but before I had fully basked in my disappointment, the RD round came and went as well, and, in spite of being accepted by my ED school, I decided not to enroll at Cornell or at the schools I had set my eye on after my initial deferral and instead committed to Columbia.

At the end of March, Our DP2 project week group was set to go to Henan to an underfunded middle school, with half of our members teaching courses there and the other half working on redesigning a reading room and library.

Unsurprisingly, I was tasked with designing the library and working with my group members to procure the materials we would need. Admittedly, during the more detached planning process that took place on campus, I treated the project not unlike my DP1 project week or any other design venture. However, when we set foot in Henan and arrived for our first day at the middle school, it dawned on me that this project, that the room I had designed, would truly be realised and come to mean something. 

My design of the reading room

From assembling chairs and tables with my groupmates to cutting carpets into the right shape, every step we took together made the room look a little bit more like the one in the design plan I had created. Kids from the middle school would come in, watching as their music ‘teacher’ played the piano, and sing along. 

The art pieces they created in their art class would be stuck up on the walls that were bare in my design, and the books they wanted to read found themselves in the shelves we had painstakingly assembled days before. 

The actual reading room 

Seeing people happy in the space I had designed and helped build was what allowed me to understand that your worth can extend to others — that the skills honed in the classroom, tools sharpened through homework assignments and high school competitions were not only completion-based. My time at UWC allowed me to make a change, and the people I met at UWC wanted to make that change with me. 

Together, our project week group laughed during lunch with the children at the middle school, chatting with them about the celebrities they liked and the fictional characters they wanted to grow up and be like. We learned to play the songs they liked on the piano so they could learn them in music class, learned what their favourite TV shows were to reference when teaching English, and learned of their dreams for the future in art class. 

The ultimate frisbee games that one could always spot on the grass circle or on our footballfield found themselves, again, in the concrete court of Liyuantun No. 3 Middle School.

English teaching for the middle school students

Returning to campus, it was with a similar mindset that I began working on the community hotspot project. Set on redesigning and revamping the international kitchen to become a community space, I worked with my peers to come up with a design that would not only be visually pleasing but functional in all the ways the community hoped for. 

We worked with the school every step along the way, to secure funding and sponsors for vending machines, appliances, and long-awaited microwaves. Though I myself would never see the completion of this project in my time as a student, knowing that I went from little critiques of the school’s architecture in my head to having something of my own design built in the school still is a source of great incredulity to me.

Performing at One World Concert

Just as the year began hectically, it also came to a close before I could even realise. My last philosophy class came in the blink of an eye, and the last IA deadline came and went. College commitment deadlines followed, then, as I found myself walking down the gym stairs after my English paper 2 exam, I realised that high school was actually, against all odds, coming to a close. My journey at UWC was definitely tumultuous, but overwhelmingly irreplaceable. 

Whether it be the life-long bonds made amongst my peers, the teachers who also resembled friends more than anything in the end, skills and knowledge from courses and extracurriculars, or even the fulfillment of wishes and promises I thought would never be complete, UWC granted me a high school life I never dared to even imagine. 

On one of my final days before graduation, a few of my classmates and I went to watch the sunrise from the Yushan bridge. Seeing the sun spill over the skyline that had grown infinitely taller and more populated since the nights of my FP year, it truly dawned on me how much had changed since. In me, in my view of the world, and my view of humanity. 

Tree planting with community members on Earth Day

I find myself looking forward to the life beyond this island, of what I can achieve with all the UWC experiences dyeing me as cornstarch on a white shirt during a Colour Run. 

Whether that be through perfecting social housing or delving into sustainable housing, my dreams of grandeur with architecture find themselves rooted once more in the people who inhabit those spaces I design. I leave UWC with the maturity of a high school graduate showing in my skills but with a nurtured, child-like idealism and a promise to do good.

-End-