" Walking those streets again as a Columbia student, I realized the decade in between had changed my role: I was no longer only learning. I was beginning to create."
More than ten years after I first arrived in Cambridge as a middle-school student on a language exchange, I returned this summer for the Junior Researcher Programme. That first trip was also my first time leaving China. I came then only knowing how to absorb other people's knowledge. Walking those streets again as a Columbia student, I realized the decade in between had changed my role: I was no longer only learning. I was beginning to create.
The programme placed me with student researchers from around the world. Together we studied how AI shapes public engagement with climate change and presented our findings. What stayed with me was watching my cohort share unfinished work at an academic conference. I had assumed that stage belonged to polished projects and more senior scholars. Seeing early ideas treated as worth sharing made me braver about my own, and more willing to try opportunities I would once have postponed.
As a student from a low-income family, I know this kind of opportunity is not automatic. The Global Learning Scholarship is the reason I could return to Cambridge at all. Cultural difference also changed how I collaborate: the same survey wording could mean something entirely different depending on who was in the room, and we had to keep revising until we understood one another.
I came back to Cambridge to close a circle that had been open since I was a teenager. I left knowing that the student who once only learned could also create.
