MY UNIVERSITY
2 min readA Cradle of Higher Education
It is no exaggeration to say Zhuhai, now hosting a dozen prestigious institutions of higher education,isa”university town”. The city’s’ stunningly high percentage of the student population injects a steady flow of youthful energy into the bloodstream of the city, with the resulting considerable demographic changes exerting far-reaching impacts beyond the educational genome.
The coastal settlement is a beautiful illustration of how creative minds are fostered by a “green” city and reward the city in many aspects. The city’s outstanding farsightedness is fully reflected in the fact that each university campus is set in one of the most scenic locations in Zhuhai The signature buildings and vistas-Banzhang Mountain of Jinan University, Fenghuang Mountain by the Zhuhai Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Guanyin Hill at Jilin University’s Zhuhai College, along with Chihua Hill near the Zhuhai campus of Beijing Institute of Technology-all contribute significantly to the city’s skyline.
Zhuhai has five seasons. The fifth season involves its university term times teeming with the breath of youth-the excitement of new arrivals starting their freshman year and the nostalgic joy of graduates parting ways to start a new life.
Although the city’s Nanping Village gave birth to the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university, and the consensus that”a city without universities will not have future”had been long reached, the city”s”university boom” did not start until the late 1990s. The first line of the city’s “university map”was drawn in 1998, when the Zhuhai campus of Jinan University was unveiled as the city’s first full-time university. The next decade saw 10 universities breaking new ground in Zhuhai and bringing some 130,000 students into the city.
The universities, together with their surroundin, are generating density of high-tech businesses, technology incubators, creative industrial blocks, businesses catering primarily to the university structure, and residential quarters that encompass lovely shopping plazas and set new lifestyle trends for urban dwellers.
The uniqueness of the higher education scene of Zhuhai, however, is not simply a bubble of prestigious names and beautiful campuses. The universities’ Zhuhai campuses combine to produce a diverse curriculum with each having its strength in specific sectors such as information and design at BITZH, translation at Jinan University and its special school open exclusively to overseas Chinese, the “TianQin” Project (a space gravitational wave detection research and development project)run by SYSU, the Sino-German cooperation projects of BNU and the inorganic and preparative chemistry program of Jilin University.
