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What kind of students can be successfully admitted to Yale University?
What are the conditions to stand out from the top 10 million?
What experiences and highlights made those Yale undergraduates so different?
If you're curious about the answers to these questions, don't miss out on the Yale Beijing Center's new public account column in 2021, "Those Yale Undergraduates." In the column, you will see the most vivid and true stories of Yale undergraduates, hoping to provide some directional inspiration for everyone's pursuit of education.
This issue introduces Hongyi Wang, a 2022 undergraduate student majoring in architecture and economics at Yale. Growing up in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, the living environment gave him a unique perspective on himself and the world, and listened to him "slowly".
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This article is about 3500 words long and is expected to take 6 minutes to read
Yale University Class of 2022 undergraduate Wang Hongyi
Graduated from high school: Changshu World Union College, China
College: Pauli Murray College
Major: Architectural Design and Economics
Position: President of CUSY Chinese Undergraduate Student Union (Class of 2020-2021)
Wang Hongyi, who studied architecture at Yale, has some ambitions of his own, such as his desire to make some changes that are conducive to long-term development in the environment through the ingenious conception of architectural design.
Wang Hongyi gave an example of a drawer box - is the place occupied big? Does it look good? Isn't it cheap in terms of price? Can you remind everyone to reduce the use of paper through these design changes?
Essentially, it's very much in line with his criteria for evaluating a movie, a lunchbox, a city. "It has to be efficient, it can stuff people or things that are related to people, it can stuff all kinds of functions, it has to be comfortable, and it has to look good."
This is a set of deconstructions and construction methods that this architecture student is accustomed to, that is, how to create a space for people, things, and social relations, and present it in a way that he thinks is beautiful. Here contains his intellectual thinking, but also with people, and life collision with the perception, he picked up the building, looked at the world, but also looked at himself.
The "slow pace" of architecture students grows into a memory
Why do you want to study architecture, Wang Hongyi, who was born and grew up in Suzhou, did not mention this hometown famous for its gardens and architecture in the answer at the beginning. But on the day of the interview, he wore plain and clean clothes, spoke softly, and talked about his love of drinking tea at school—traits that were internalized to the point of unconsciousness, perhaps needless to mention in his opinion, but had penetrated inside and outside.
To introduce Suzhou, Wang Hongyi felt that it was a very complicated thing, but he tried to summarize it simply, "It is a very old city, with more than 2600 years of history and culture, and a lot of literati are from Suzhou." It may be more traditional and slower paced. ”
Wang Hongyi seems to be such a "slow-paced" person. For example, even in a big city, he feels that he will have a state of mind that is not very fast; even in a very "volume" environment, he will have a higher expectation of slow life; even in a relatively limited range, he also hopes to have a certain degree of freedom to do what he wants to do.
Fortunately, Wang Hongyi's high school, Changshu World Union College, gave him the opportunity to expand more interests and hobbies at his own pace. In high school, he participated in a variety of activities in his spare time: playing drums and bands, experimenting with stage design, participating in poverty alleviation projects, curating ways to help autistic children, playing boat balls, participating in summer camps related to architecture, and so on.
Wang Hongyi and the band performed
Also because of the enthusiasm for exploration of different fields, Wang Hongyi, who has loved painting and doing handicrafts since childhood, feels that architecture is a profession that can perfectly realize this wish. "Architecture is related to art and design on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has some engineering and mathematical knowledge that I am very interested in, and it also contains the history of humanities and social sciences that I am weak, so I think it is a discipline that integrates."
Wang Hongyi's paintings – Top: Yale Dwight Hall; Bottom: Travel Paintings
Recalling the application season, Wang Hongyi, who received offers from several top universities in the UK and Yale University, chose the latter. Yale's undergraduate architecture program is different from architecture at some universities in the UK, and it is a "non-professional degree" based on liberal arts education, meaning students can learn about many other humanities courses outside of professional courses.
"I found this form of Liberal Arts fascinating to me because it encouraged you to approach the world from more angles and ways, to understand the world, to understand your relationship with the world." This philosophy is perfectly in line with wang Hongyi's expectations, he hopes that he will not be limited by the architecture profession, but will learn more about interdisciplinary knowledge during his undergraduate studies on the basis of satisfying his interest in architecture.
Let the outlet of a plate of food be a city
I've been living with architecture at Yale for three full years. When it comes to learning what the biggest change that architecture brings to herself, Wang Hongyi feels that she understands how to look at problems more systematically.
"Maybe there were times when details were tangled up before, but a lot of things are beyond the surface. When you look at something slowly, you see its history, you see its mechanism, you see the design ideas behind it, the engineering perspective, including its relationship to other things. ”
Wang Hongyi once took a major in architecture around "food", which gave him great inspiration. This is a course taught by Michael Schlabs, director of undergraduate studies at Yale University' Architecture program.
Under the guidance of the teacher, the students started from studying a food, to thinking about the presentation of food, how to design a lunch box containing architectural concepts and ingenuity, to designing a space that can accommodate four or six people to enjoy this food, and finally how to design an urban space to meet the materials of food, the production of food, the sharing of food, and integrate into the local environment with historical and cultural origins.
Wang Hongyi's design drawings for this architecture course starting from "food"
This course seems to start from a thing that is far away from the building, but it allows Wang Hongyi to understand how to explore the relationship between the things around him and the people and the environment. The "food" course became a shovel, allowing Wang Hongyi to dig out a methodology that he was very beneficial to.
For example, through careful observation, through the phenomenon to see the essence, with the known to push the unknown. In terms of learning, he believes that everything should start with small things, after building the foundation of knowledge, look for the interconnection between disciplines, and summarize a law that can apply and solve macro problems in the social environment after rough extraction.
Wang Hongyi, who is studying in the fourth year of architecture, feels that it has become difficult to give a definition of architecture. "It's hard to say exactly what the building is. It (architecture) is more about the material communication between man and this society, or the material and the spiritual communication that it extends. ”
Wang Hongyi design works: lamps made of only one kind of glue and paper
How the "Great God" was made
In addition to the building itself, a large part of the energy wang Hongyi harvested comes from teachers and classmates majoring in architecture.
A feature of Yale's undergraduate architecture program is that it is mainly taught in small classes, and the exchanges between students and between students and professors are very frequent. In addition to lectures, architecture students are required to participate in two-hour studio projects twice a week. Wang Hongyi will discuss the project assignment at hand with the students in the studio class to see each other's design progress. In addition, he will also go to the weekly TA Session to meet with teaching assistants, or talk to professors after class about his academic and life problems.
This tight-knit community is like a strong and warm web for Wang Hongyi, "If you have a problem, you can fall back, and then someone will catch your feeling." 」 ”
Group photo of Wang Hongyi and classmates
Like his peers, Wang Hongyi often felt pressure and confusion. Because there are very few people studying architecture around, becoming a good architect in addition to the professional learning that must be experienced also requires further study and years of accumulation, which is obviously a not so easy way to go. How to strengthen his heart and overcome anxiety and impetuosity has become a stage challenge that Wang Hongyi has to face at the moment.
He confided in many teachers, such as the one who talked about architecture from "food." When Wang Hongyi learned that this teacher who graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree had gone to military service and went to the battlefield halfway through college, he felt that his entanglement suddenly became worthless. Wang Hongyi still remembers the teacher's description very clearly: "Jumping out of the school atmosphere, after two years on the battlefield, there is a feeling that the screws in my brain are tightened." ”
Although no one's life path is completely overlapping, the professor's words seem to give Wang Hongyi a shot of reassurance. "Going back and understanding this school environment again will give you a clearer picture of what you want to get from this environment and what you want to learn." The teacher encouraged me to explore slowly, not to think about the high school, the university after the end of the graduate school, but first think about what kind of person I want to be in the future, what kind of things I want to do, and then go to the specifics of these things. ”
Wang Hongyi's design notes
The teaching assistant of another architecture class also enlightened Wang Hongyi by telling his own experience. When the increasingly early employment pressure makes the newly enrolled students anxious to find an internship, the teaching assistant encourages Wang Hongyi to start from himself, slow down, and find his own rhythm.
In fact, when I was an undergraduate assistant, I dropped out of school halfway through my studies because of my poor family conditions. The teaching assistant who interrupted his studies went to the construction site to move bricks for a few years, and only after a few years was able to return to campus as he wished, eventually graduating from Yale's graduate school of architecture. In Wang Hongyi's view, this assistant teacher is the kind of person who can fix his mind and move towards the goal no matter what difficulties he faces.
"At Yale, I've met a lot of people who have had this kind of experience or are very powerful in their thinking, and it makes me feel like I have to continue to work hard to become such a 'big god.'"
The road to learning is long and obstructive, and the line is coming
This fall semester, Wang Hongyi finally returned to the Yale campus after a year's absence. Wang Hongyi, who did not choose Gap, recalled that the study life of the past year was not easy.
If it is in school, Wang Hongyi gets up early in the day, often rushes to eat breakfast when the canteen is open, and sometimes meets with the Japanese classmates next door to practice Japanese and teach each other Chinese while eating breakfast. He likes to concentrate his classes in the morning, and the rest of the time is used to do homework for architecture classes, read books, and in his spare time, he will also ask three or two friends to drink tea and chat together.
But the pandemic has undoubtedly brought challenges. Not only are there fewer opportunities for communication, but also because many classes are small lessons that need to be discussed, the principle of not being absent and the problem of jet lag will always collide. "One of the five people in our group was in South Africa, one in China, one on the West Coast, one on the (U.S.) Central, and one on the East Coast, and it was really difficult to coordinate at that time, so it would lead to sleep problems."
The routine of getting up at three or four o'clock to go to class has become the new normal for Wang Hongyi, but on the road of learning, he has not been "dissuaded" at all.
"Simply put, it's what to do. What do you feel like you want to do, what you should do, which direction you should work in, and then what is your responsibility to the big society and the people around you, and what is your responsibility to yourself. These are clear what to do and what to do. ”
Wang Hongyi is recently working on a graduate application, hoping that in the far future, she can go to different places to explore local culture, customs, architecture, and then do something that is in line with the local area.
Wang Hongyi designed a display of his works
Off the Cliff
New Haven Wastelot Transformation
Dominant Void - Yale School of Architecture Installation
sectional study project
Car model
Intern Jingjing Yang also contributed to this article
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