By Zhang Keyuan
Sophomore from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi

Thinking back to 2004 the experience of coming to America and studying in America, many stories come to mind with many feelings: happiness, frustration, pride, loneliness. However, like most young Chinese students who journey here at an early age, I feel no regret about my choice.

My journey started when I was in senior one. I took TOEFL twice and finally got a grade of 613. It was not the best, but it was a promising start. After a year of preparing documents, applying to different schools and doing interviews, I chose to attend a liberal arts college called Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. This school has a good reputation for its high academic standard. It also offered me appealing scholarships. It is really hard to prepare application while keep a good grade in high school that time, but I think the important thing is to have a positive and strong mind about your future, which is to always believe in what you are doing, no matter how other people keep attacking your dreams and how hard the situation is for you. This belief will help you last through your high school, though your school application, your visa application, and even your college years in America.

Only having a strong mind and grounded belief is not enough. A lot of study has to be done, tons and tons of extra work has to be done. Sometimes you need to seek other people¡¯s professional help. After my visa was rejected the first time, I felt very hopeless and upset. At this time, Starglory provided me a large amount of professional help on visa application, which helped me successfully get my visa the second time I applied. That was in the year 2004, when visa applications were largely rejected. Without their patient help and nice encouragement, I think that there was much less of a chance for me to get my visa.

When I first came to America, I went through some major language problems. I always considered myself a very good English speaker in high school and I had confidence in my English communication ability. When I went to my first lecture at Millsaps, I sat there for 50 minutes, totally lost with what the teacher was talking about and didn¡¯t understand a single point. After the lecture, we were supposed to answer a question according to what we just heard: Do you agree or disagree with what the professor said? My problem was that I didn¡¯t even know what the professor said in this whole class! Once again, I felt like back to those frustrating days in high school. I started to borrow notes from my teachers and always read the assignments before the class, going to class fully prepared. Fortunately, professors here are all super nice, and they are always very patient with every single question I have, no matter how many times I ask it. Their commitment to students and their kindness just amaze me sometimes. Gradually, everything started to make sense to me in class.

Millsaps is a liberal arts college. It encourages students to think, to question many social and historical issues, and we have to put these thoughts in writing. My first semester here, I wrote 14 papers, and one of them was a 10 page project. When I was in high school, I was a science student and the longest English article I wrote was 300 words long. As you can imagine, writing became a tough problem. My solution was to always to talk to the professor about the paper before I wrote, and always go to the writing center to have somebody revise my paper after I finished, at least have somebody tell me what I should improve in my paper. After a semester, I could feel that my writing skills have improved a lot. My grades also rose from B- to B+. The next year became much easier to me, and I¡¯ve been making straight A¡¯s so far.

When I was in my darkest time here in America¡ªwhich was when I couldn¡¯t understand teachers in class, didn¡¯t dare to talk to other people, and felt very lonely away from my family and friends¡ªone thing that helped me through all of this was the belief that I had made the right decision about coming here and that all these problems will be solved eventually. I felt like I learned a lot in class, especially learned to think about society, religion, art and history in different ways that I¡¯ve never thought of before. I learned that nothing could be as simple as it appeared. And during this year and a half, for the first time, I had to look for a job, make money on my own, try to pay half of my fees; for the first time, I had to look for an apartment and live completely on my own; for the first time, I came to understand how it was to make money; for the first time I knew how to be truly independent, probably not completely (since my parents still have to pay some of my fees), but more spiritually; I learned to make decisions for myself, like what classes to take, which job to take and also how I want to plan my future. All these experiences I had, although not all of them are happy, became very precious in my life, because I saw myself growing up in them. Looking back to all these things that I¡¯ve accomplished, I feel very proud of myself, deep from my heart. I¡¯ve heard friends who came to America talking very similar about this, but I could not understand it or feel it until I went through these things myself. And these feelings are what that make these experiences so precious.

There are still many obstacles ahead waiting for me but I¡¯m not afraid of them because I always have the support of my parents and my friends. I have all the help from others like I¡¯ve got before from Mr. Zhang and Heidi Huang from Starglory. This support and help keeps me working hard towards my goal, which is to be successful in my career and be happy about my life.