A day in the life

Following her own path

Ying Zhou took two weeks to get to Halifax, driving across the country in a rented RV with her parents. But her journey to Dalhousie took even longer.

Originally from Wuhan, China, Ying moved to Vancouver for high school where she completed the science stream of the International Baccalaureate program.

“It gave me the chance to do some university-level science, but I realized that science wasn’t my thing,” she says. “I was doing better in my history, social studies, and political science classes. My parents weren’t happy because my grandfather was a famous engineer and my father is one as well. They kind of expected me to be an engineer.”

Ying’s family may not have been thrilled that she didn’t want to go into engineering, but they were supportive when she explained she wanted to study something that would give her a good background for law school.

“They said that if I wanted to do humanities, then I should take something that would help me understand the world better as well as my position in the world,” she says. “Political science gives me the theories to apply to the real world.”

Coming from the city that spawned the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China in 1912, perhaps it’s no wonder Ying chose political science as an area of study. But it was her high school guidance counsellor in Vancouver who told her about Dalhousie.

“I took some university classes while I was in high school," she says. "There were some with about 1,000 people in them and you couldn’t even see the professor. I felt like I was watching a DVD of the class, rather than actually participating in it. I told my guidance counsellor that I wanted to go to a good school, but a fairly small one, with a good humanities program. She said I should come to Dal.”

Despite the 24-hour travel time to visit her parents in China, Ying is thrilled with Dalhousie and the Political Science program.

“The professors are very accessible and patient, especially when I’m writing papers,” she says. “I sometimes get carried away because the Chinese way of writing is a lot more free-flow than English. But my professors help me get back on track. At other schools you would probably be meeting with a TA, not a professor.

“One of my favourite classes is Political Thought because it’s basically all about political philosophy. It has a long reading list, especially since English isn’t my first language, but Professor Fierlbeck is a brilliant teacher.”

She has immersed herself in the university experience outside of the classroom as well, by participating in numerous societies on campus. In her third year she’s going to be the vice-president of events for the Undergraduate Political Science Society.

As for her future, Ying still plans to go into law and then return to China to start a charity for homeless animals.

“The country is developing so quickly that people are always moving away and leaving their pets behind on the streets,” she says. “There are no real animal cruelty laws or regulations, so I want to set up an organization that would look after the abandoned pets and try to get laws passed to protect them. My political science degree will help me because it teaches me about how governments work and how I can influence them.”