Summer camp proves a hot ticket among young students

Mentor set student on the right track

Chen Yixin considers new friendships to be a key takeaway from her British summer camp experience in 2016.

“In particular, I developed a special bond with a guest lecturer, who is a programmer based at Silicon Valley, and who led our course on the US’ tech start-up sector. She became a great friend and mentor, and instilled in me a fascination for this sector,” said Chen, a third-year student at Shanghai University.

Her role model inspired her to apply for a master’s degree in the US.

“She is very supportive and gave lots of useful advice,” said Chen. “We even met up again last summer when I went to the US for a holiday. I am amazed by how such chance encounters can build up great connections.”

Chen’s summer school camp program, which was organized by Shanghai University, included four weeks of classes split between Oxford and Cambridge. In Oxford, she studied economics. In Cambridge, she learned about technology.

She also appreciated the opportunity to get to know more about the UK during the summer camp, which struck her as “a unique mixture of the historical and the modern”, and she found the lessons informative.

One memorable class assignment was a research project about the European refugee crisis, an academically challenging project that also opened her eyes to an interesting and controversial subject, and allowed her to develop critical-thinking skills.

But, on the downside, she found it a little disappointing that most of her classmates at the summer camp were Chinese.

“I would have preferred to have some local classmates, to get a more British experience,” she said.