I was a different person then, but I can remember three years ago saying goodbye to my family at an airport in Charleston, South Carolina. Trying to hide the tears, I hugged them and rushed towards the security line with my passport, whose binding was still stiff at the time and pages all but empty, except for one page: a student visa to China that would allow me to study at NYU Shanghai. At the time, I spoke no Chinese, had never been to China, and I had never left the US. I actually first heard Chinese on the 12 to 14 hour flight heading to Shanghai from one of my layover cities. In the hours of that flight I remember the tears budding up from time and time as I asked myself, “What was I thinking? What made me think I could do this?”That was the first and only time I questioned my school choice. NYU Shanghai is hard to define. Even for me, who has attended this school for three years and is in his final year, it is hard to find the words that can truly capture this experience . On Wikipedia (the most scholarly of sources, as we all know), NYU Shanghai is defined as “the first American college to receive independent registration status from China’s Ministry of Education,” and as being “jointly established by New York University and East China Normal University of Shanghai.” But that isn’t all of it. You could add that half of its student body comes from Mainland China and half of its students from the rest of the world and you might be getting closer, but you’d still be missing something unexplainable. There are some that have defined it in the past as “NYU’s bad school” or as a mistake, but for me and the students who have decided to stay here, that couldn’t be further from the truth. So if I, a student still studying at NYU Shanghai, had to try to define what this school is to someone on the outside, I would have to say simply, in a description that is probably inadequate, that NYU Shanghai is… *Drumroll please* Not for everyone. And that is okay. NYU Shanghai is not for the person that wants to be comfortable, nor for the person who wants everything to be perfect and in place. It is for the person who finds comfort in the discomfort because that means that there is still something to learn or understand. It is for the architect of a better future who looks at what may be and questions how it might be better. It is for the risk takers who would be unhappy on a closed campus where everything is settled and everyone more or less the same. It is for those who are ready to ask and answer hard and complicated questionsabout themselves, their cultures, and this world. It is for those who accept culture shock as an experience that will only make them stronger. It is for those who want to “make the world their major,” “play another octave on the piano,” and all that jazz. It might be for you, but there is nothing wrong with you if it isn’t. But for someone who it was ideal choice for and whose experience here is about to end, I must say it has been the experience of a lifetime. This isn’t to say it was easy. I fumbled, tripped, and fell more times than I could count, but it has repeatedly taught me that I can get back up stronger and more informed. In the classroom, it taught me the real importance of having other points of view at the table. It were those students who were different than me or came from another place that made me question the way I looked at even the most basic of concepts. They made the conversation more complex and rewarding, allowing me to learn in a way I could not imagine I would be afforded at any other university in the U.S., especially if I decided to stay in South Carolina. Outside of the classroom, it has given me the opportunity in proximity, scholarship, service, and competition to travel to places I would have never imagined: India, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Ghana, the Czech Republic, and France, just to name a few. With nothing set in stone, it has allowed me to create what I saw was missing and fix what I felt was broken. Its size has allowed me to sit down and discuss graduate school and the future with high ranking administrators who might not have had time for me at another university, has made the directors of my major my friends, and has given me a family of friends who, when I had to say goodbye to for breaks or my year studying away from Shanghai, induces the same tears I shed three years earlier when I said goodbye to my real family, and who would make a bed for me almost anywhere in the world. But perhaps most importantly, it has made me the person I have always wanted to be. It has made me a Global Citizen. So you can say what you want about NYU Shanghai. We aren’t perfect and to be honest we will be the first ones to tell you that, as you can probably tell by the sea of articles that criticize the school contained in this very publication, but know that this is not without reason. We criticize this school more than it should be at times because we, unlike students at other universities, have been empowered to be the change we want to see. We rarely talk about what is going well because we are a group of students always keen to find ways we can improve, so take our criticism with a grain of salt or a couple spoonfuls of soy sauce. At the end of the day, the majority of NYU Shanghai students find the education here worth it, which is what has kept most of us aboard this sometimes rocky ship. We recognize along the way we have lost a few and we understand that this journey isn’t for everyone, but for those of us still at NYU Shanghai, we couldn’t imagine ourselves anywhere else but aboard. This article was written by Tyler Rhorick. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: NYU Shanghai