Yifei Jia, Recipient of the BetaCollege Dean’s Award

On a quiet Saturday evening, the residential colleges at Westlake are filled with music, laughter, and applause.

Inthe common room ofBetaCollege, Yifei Jia and otherstudentssharesongs they like and the stories behind them.

As a freshman, Jia carries both vigor and maturity beyond his years.

When he talks about his stories on campus, he sounds like a senior student who is so familiar with the university. But in fact, he only joined this new home seven months ago.

Last summer, Jia’s name started to appear frequently on the university news. The then high school graduate was offered a place at Westlake in the inaugural class of undergraduates.

Students in high school follow  a meticulously organized schedule, but that changes at university. Hongyu Chen, dean of the residential colleges, sees this as a time for students to develop skills to manage their own lives and study. This can challenge some, Yifei Jia thrives at university, taking full advantage of the autonomy at the college and shaping it to his needs.

For example, freshmen at Westlake have the freedom to choose courses. Though Jia knew from the beginning that he wanted to study circuit and chip design, he chose philosophy over physics and chemistry in the first year. “It’s a matter of time before taking the relevant courses. For now, I’d prefer to learn something different,” he said. Jia also chose introduction to biology despite not taking it in high school. He was “deeply touched” by the cutting-edge research he learned in Hongjun Shi’s class, and driven to learn knowledge previously outside his range. In the end, he received a satisfactory score on this subject.

Jia won first prize in the Zhejiang Informatic Competition while in high school. Now that he’s at college, he has decided to share his knowledge with others. After noticing peers struggling with network traffic when turning in math assignments, Jia decided to give a talk on website design so that the participants would understand the cause in the backend. He also invited students majoring in software development to the talk. An event that size might not seem much, but it involves discovering the problem, revealing the principle, and sharing and inviting peers to the discussion, similar to what researchers do in their daily work.

In his spare time, Jia akesaims to make extracurricular time fun for all. Thanks to his experience at the student union at high school, he became a member of the presidential group at the Beta College Self Development Committee where he defines the culture of the college, organizes activities, and formulates rules and regulations. The music sharing event mentioned before arose from their brainstorming, and has now become a specialty event at Beta College. His interest in computers also came in handy to help create a bot for automatic scheduling and reminders.

Jia was recognized at the beginning of this year when he, along with three others, received the Dean’s Award at the Auditorium. But that didn’t change this calm and confident young man on campus.

At Westlake, we aim to reform the undergraduate education in China. Before declaring majors, students take classes from the interdisciplinary core curriculum to build a breadth of knowledge in science, engineering, humanities, and social sciences. We also emphasize social responsibility, innovation and leadership. Yifei Jia demonstrated his will and efforts as a productive college student within months. He and his fellow students are building a new culture for the residential colleges.