Turning A Second-Tier College Into a First-Tier Experience

Mengping Li, originally from a small town in Sichuan Province, was prepping for her college entrance exam when the disastrous earthquake of 2008 occurred. Although surrounded by misery, the testing went forward.  Mengping ended up being accepted at Chengdu University of Traditional Medicine. (See post one.)
Mengping  was concerned. Although she had passed through Chengdu as a teenager on her way to summer camp, she was nervous about the move.

“In the small county we only have one street, the commercial street so you can buy the things. In the big city it’s so hard to find places. At the very beginning, I was not getting used to it.“
Mengping soon adjusted to her surroundings. But she couldn’t quite get used to the fact it was a "second tier" school. 

“Most of our professors-- they just wanted to become a university teacher to have a stable job. It’s not that they wanted to be teachers.The top tier schools (like Beijing/Qinhua/Shanghai Jiaotung) had better resources. Our resources were quite limited."
Her major was Foreign Languages…but there was no Foreign Language Library at her school. (After she graduated, it came out that the President of her university and the leader of the Communist Party were siphoning off funds, funds that should have gone toward that library.)
But rather than lament, Mengping found solutions. 

1. She identified the professors who were passionate about teaching, and she went to their “office hours.” The office hours were more like small-group sessions. A handful of students would show up at the appointed time, and ask questions.
“At the very beginning I could not ask questions because I was not confident about myself. I’m a student from a small countryside. I just listened."

Li Bai: China's Immortal Poet

2. In addition, Mengping got up at 6:30 a.m. and listened to BBC for two hours, read poetry from Li Bai to offer her some direction in life, and walked around the campus talking to the flowers and the trees.
“People thought I was crazy.”
3. Most importantly, she discovered that her school was located near a first-tier university : The Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.
“I had a high-school classmate who went to that university, and so I could go to that library.“ Mengping read all about Kaifu Lee, one of the most prominent figures in the internet sector, and the founder of Google China. She was inspired. 

She came away thinking, “The most important thing is not which university you pick. It’s how you use the four years to come to independent thinking, to know more about yourself."

(To be continued.  Next: Element of Control Lights a Fire In Her Soul.)