Name: Lucas Wille
Year: Senior
Major: Business Enterprise Management, with a concentration on consulting
Second major: Chinese Language and Culture
Hometown: Minneapolis, MN
As a current senior at Wake Forest, Lucas is one of the few people that grew to understand both the perspective of international students and that of American students. As early as his sophomore year in high school, he started to get to know Chinese culture through a field trip halfway across the world, to China. Since then, he has devoted a great amount of his time to studying both the Chinese language and the culture of China. During his four years at Wake, he has been involved in plenty of cultural events such as being the president of Chinese Studies Club (CSC), studying abroad in Shanghai for the past two summers and volunteering as a Program Assistant for the World Wide Wake pre-orientation event during summer 2017. All these allowed him to better understand international students at Wake as an American student.
Lucas told us that Chinese Studies Club is currently in its second year and has grown so much in the past semester. It has developed from a club merely serving American students learning Chinese to an intercultural club that creates space for both American and Chinese students to blend with the other group. When asked what specifically the CSC does, Lucas explained, “We work with the Chinese department. About 30 percent of the events are run by the TAs for American students to practice their Chinese. This year, we tried to create a good foundation for a set of certain events.” Through my own experience in this club, these events include calligraphy, Sino-American friendship tables, Mid-Autumn Festival event, hotpot nights, et cetera. Lucas explained that the first goal of this club is to raise awareness about Chinese culture because “Chinese people know way more about America than Americans know about China,” and it’s very important to have cultural literacy— to have a basic understanding of a culture. The second goal is just to create more opportunities to meet people on campus in general, to de-stress and to build new relationships.
When asked about his social experience at Wake, Lucas said that almost all of his friends during his freshman and sophomore year were American, but after he studied abroad in China during the summer, he could better understand Chinese students’ perspectives, and now his friends are a mixture of American and international students. However, Lucas expressed his concern about a gap in between the two groups on campus because “Understandably, people tend to want to be around people who have common interests so they can talk about familiar things, but globalization is happening and this is how the world works now.” He added, “Of course it’s good if you have connections in China, but what’s more important is to understand another culture and see the people in that culture as friends instead of enemies. This could avoid so many problems in the world today.”
Some actions are needed to improve the situation right now, and Lucas indicated that all three parties—international students, American students and the school—need to act. “The school needs to start taking initiatives and to focus on integration,” Lucas said. “They can support intercultural clubs more or just have more activities in general, maybe weekly events, because students need more spaces to meet new people, to socialize or just to relax.” As for international students, they shouldn’t be discouraged if it seems like they don’t have anything in common with the American students. Lucas suggested that sometimes they just need to dig deeper to find things in common because there are more things under the surface that people, in general, have in common. For American students, Lucas said it’s very important to put themselves into international students’ shoes and be patient. “Just think about how they are trying to socialize using a foreign language already, and sometimes they can be shy about it.” Sometimes it really requires both groups to push themselves a little bit and to be as open-minded as possible.
Even though Lucas realizes this gap between American and international students on campus, he is still positive, in general, about the situation at Wake. “I’ve seen seven classes by now, and the freshmen and sophomores right now are definitely more open-minded and outgoing than the students before.” He explained, “We’re making progress. It’s slow but it’s happening.”
Photos courtesy of: Lucas Wille