Shanghai New York University is a 15-story Academic Building. The university has no playground or walls. How does the Go Local program, launched by NYU Shanghai in the fall semester of 2020 work? Is it possible for Shanghai New York University and Shanghai United International School to share quality academic resources? In addition to excellent academic performance, what comprehensive qualities will make candidates stand out? With questions like these, Maxine Lu, General Principal of Shanghai Xiehe Education Group, led a cross-campus university guidance counselor team and walked into the vertical campus, which has attracted much attention since its establishment.
After Chancellor Tong’s brief introduction of NYU Shanghai, the principals and university guidance counselors of Xiehe have thrown out long-standing questions and the discussion was centered around the following core topics.
Admissions
What kind of students does Xiehe hope to cultivate? What kind of applicants does NYU Shanghai like? In the discussion, the two sides have reached a consensus.
Chancellor Tong has repeatedly stressed that the students to be offered by NYU Shanghai must be suitable for the University. They should have an international vision, adaptive to the competitive environment of international metropolises, willing to communicate cross-culturally, sensitive to new things and have the courage to pursue what they want. Upon admissions, NYU Shanghai conducts the comprehensive evaluation and select the best candidates. This enables NYU Shanghai to assess comprehensively whether or not an applicant is suitable for the university. NYU Shanghai will see whether or not an applicant is gregarious, articulate and has a strong affinity. Good communication skills in English are also required.
Maxine Lu added that no matter what curricula the students take, local or international, or no matter what exams they take, Chinese Gaokao or IB/ A Level /BC/AP exams, students should have the core qualities mentioned above to rise to the challenges of the future world. As an educational group where East meets West, Xiehe has been working hard to be inclusive so that students can do well in both local and international curricular, which is not an easy task to accomplish. The establishment of NYU Shanghai is regarded as a pilot project of China’s higher education reform and development. Xiehe will continue to explore new modes of talent cultivation.
Curriculum and Majors
Knowing that students at NYU Shanghai will not begin to choose majors until they have completed two years of general education, members of our university guidance counselor team asked about the distribution and direction of majors at NYU Shanghai. Chancellor Tong’s team further introduced that all the majors in NYU Shanghai are first-class ones. NYU Shanghai is a small-scale, high-quality university. Every major at NYU Shanghai involves superb professors and students. NYU Shanghai conducts some of the world’s top research projects in academic domains such as applied mathematics, philosophy, economics and STEM.
What impressed us the most is the IMA (Interactive Media Arts), a popular major at NYU Shanghai, which combines many disciplines and skills such as biology, art, programming and involves interactive games, wearable devices, computer-aided fashion design, social platforms, controllable devices powered by cutting-edge technology, etc. Chancellor Tong’s team even mentioned that if students are passionate about some unique majors, which are promising in the future, NYU Shanghai provides a certain degree of flexibility to support students to set up independent R & D majors.
Faced with the emergence of new and composite majors, we, as educators at different stages, need to realize clearly that education is a future-oriented career. It takes 15 years for a person to finish university from primary school and even more time to obtain the doctorate. The long cycle of education requires that talent training must have forward-thinking and foresight and must be far-sighted to predict, plan and explore the talent training objectives and training models demanded by the needs of future social development. Talents should be trained to be able to rise to unknown challenges.
Thinking Creatively and Establishing a Multicultural Environment
The core task of NYU Shanghai is to practice the in-depth meaning of cultural exchange. Students and professors with different backgrounds and experiences gather here to create an academic atmosphere where academic research and cross-cultural cooperation are tightly integrated. Half of the students at NYU Shanghai are from China, and students from the other 70 countries represent the other half. Therefore, many learning activities take place outside the classroom, even in the dormitory, when students study with people from different cultures, they not only need to speak different languages but will also learn to see the world in different ways. Students at NYU Shanghai will spend the first two academic years at the Shanghai campus, and up to two semesters studying at one of NYU’s study away centers in cities around the world. In this way, students’ skills to survive, learn and adapt in other cultures will be further developed.
Cooperation
NYU Shanghai was founded 9 years ago. Chancellor Tong said, “We didn’t expect so many people to be interested in us, but every year thousands of people come and visit to find out how we are doing.” The Chancellor’s team expressed, “With the continuous growth and development of NYU Shanghai, the University should and has considered in-depth cooperation and resource sharing with some educational groups like Xiehe.”
This is an in-depth exchange on international education, a dialogue between secondary education and higher education, a discussion on the practice of integration of Chinese and Western education at different stages, as well as a carrier of the great expectations of the future world for contemporary teenagers and young students.