introduce

Many parents hope to make up for their lack of education through their children. More parents in China regard the name of their children's university as their "graduation certificate", regardless of the specific impact that a particular department may have on their children's life. For most people in China, it may be better to go to a top university to study undergraduate or graduate, so as to get better development.

Source: Rao Yi? Study abroad policy (ID: fgzhwlx)

0 1

The truth may not be as bright as it seems.

Generally speaking, parents in China at home and abroad simply believe that going to top universities or graduate schools will only benefit their children. This is of course possible, and sometimes it does happen. However, there is another possibility that it may happen more frequently-that is, for most children in China, attending top schools may also have a negative impact on their lives.

Generally speaking, people in China will find this statement strange, but this view is not circulated among overseas Chinese, because most Chinese do not know this fact: because most Chinese have either never entered a top university or are unwilling to tell all the facts, especially the unpleasant ones; It is also because parents in China tend to be superstitious or speculate on the benefits of top universities.

02

What is a "top" university?

Define "top" first. The former here means at least in the former 10, especially those universities that rank in the top 5. As far as universities are concerned, the top comprehensive universities are recognized as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, and the top science and engineering colleges are California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For graduate students, the top is not only based on the comprehensive strength of the school, but usually only in a certain professional field.

Of course, there are few graduate students in the top five departments. For a long time, there were few China students in the top graduate departments in the United States. For example, the biology department of MIT is very strong. But for more than 30 years, it should accept less than 1 of China students every year on average. I am a graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In the past 30 years, its Department of Neurobiology may have recruited less than 15 students from China, and its Department of Biochemistry estimates that it has less than 10 students. China students who entered these departments knew the situation, but for various reasons, they failed to tell the truth, resulting in the outside world not knowing.

03

In fact, not many people go to top schools and then make a difference.

I estimate that the number of China graduate students who specialize in biology in MIT, Rockefeller, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF and Caltech is not only small, but also the success rate is not high. The best way to engage in biological research is usually to be a professor. However, among the above-mentioned schools, there are not many foreign students from China and Chinese Americans who later become American professors.

And science is doing well, including China people who later became professors of the above departments. I'm afraid most of them didn't graduate from these schools, but came from those American schools with good majors but not top ones.

The reason behind this is that there will be excellent American students applying for graduate schools in top American departments (including those who have done research in Nobel Prize winners' laboratories), so they not only do not actively recruit China students, but also are not considered as the main force of their research after entering the school. Teachers take care of excellent American students. In all subjects of experimental science, American teachers often regard China students as wage earners. They are not keen to discuss scientific issues with them, but mostly productive labor. Not only that, American graduate students in these top departments may perform very well in all aspects, and it is particularly easy for China students who have just arrived in the United States to lose confidence and even feel ashamed, thus changing their life trajectory.

I am a graduate student in neurobiology at UCSF University. There are four students in our class. One of them's father is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. He graduated from Harvard and went to France to study for a year. He published three research papers before he entered school. After entering the school, this classmate speaks actively in class, and gets the first place in every exam, which is also very good for his classmates. An English student in the Department of Biochemistry, who is several years older than us, comes from an academic family and graduates faster than others. His papers published during his graduate studies soon became the contents of cell biology textbooks all over the world. There is another girl in the department of biochemistry, who is good at math and outstanding in biological research. Later, she was the editor-in-chief of Cell magazine.

In the laboratory where I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, a postdoctoral fellow was the grandson of von Neumann. During his graduate studies at Harvard, he discovered a new important enzyme (PI3 kinase), which is widely known in biology. Another postdoctoral father is the head of the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University, and his brother is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. He sometimes asks the teachers in our lab in public if they can understand what he says, as if the latter were his students. This colleague studied physics at Princeton University, obtained a master's degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and obtained a doctorate in biology from the University of California, Berkeley. With such an academic background, who should I talk to about interdisciplinary issues?

04

How did the misunderstanding that "going to a top school is easy to get ahead" come about?

Because there are not many American students who love natural science, they are concentrated in top departments. As a result, in the excellent but not top American graduate school departments (let's call them "sub-top"), American students are often inferior to China students, so American departments below the sub-top not only admit more students from China, but also teachers generally attach importance to China students. The message that China students are "smug" is also the reason why China mistakenly thinks that his students are superior to American students.

Not only are there differences between the top two schools, but also disciplines will have similar situations. In the past 30 years, China students have grown up and finally become American academicians. So far, the most discipline is plant biology (so is Peking University): among more than 20 academicians from mainland China studying in China, five are plant biologists. The reason is not that botany education in China is superior to that in the United States, but that there is a long-term surplus of agricultural products in the United States, and most outstanding students in the United States do not study botany. If you choose biology, most of them prefer medicine (followed by biomedicine). Our outstanding performance in botany is the result of horse racing in Tian Ji. It is not because China people have natural expertise in botany, nor is our botany education particularly excellent.

Top undergraduate students should also have these problems: there are top American students gathered there, some of whom have excellent homework and some have strong family background. Most people in China will be frustrated by this, so most China students in these departments failed to achieve academic achievements later, because their self-confidence was gone.

They won't tell their parents, let alone write an article to tell everyone. Insist on inferiority self-confidence, most China people (especially the second generation of X, including the second generation of immigrants) do not have this psychological quality.

Gilbert Chu, the elder brother of Steven Chu, the American Secretary of Energy and the Nobel Prize winner in physics, achieved very high test scores in primary and secondary schools (so high that his two younger brothers felt ashamed in both primary and secondary schools, and his younger brother dropped out of school before finishing high school). Gilbert Chu studied at Harvard University with two doctorates, and later became a professor at Stanford University, but his name is not known to most people because he didn't make any special achievements later.

Gilbert Chu's two younger brothers, one went to the University of Rochester and the other to UCLA, are not top universities. As far as undergraduate courses are concerned, these two universities are not even "sub-optimal". However, the second and third children of Zhu family have made great achievements: the second child became a physicist; Lao San became a barrister, setting a record for the highest compensation in patent cases.

Of course, not all China people should avoid going to top universities or graduate schools, but certainly not all China people should go to top universities as long as they can be admitted.

05

The "rich second generation" gathered in the upper class face the same psychological challenges in top universities.

Are there no obstacles for the rich second generation in top universities? The top universities in the United States open special channels for politicians from all over the world every year. Their children are not only rich for a long time, but also famous entrepreneurs and executives of several generations.

Of course, this article is basically useless, because most people in China not only don't understand what these schools actually mean to their children, but also don't want to know. Many parents hope to make up for their lack of education through their children. More parents in China regard the name of their children's university as their "graduation certificate", regardless of the specific impact that a particular department may have on their children's life.