What to Expect When Your Child Attends University in China: A Parent’s On-the-Ground Experience
I knelt on the floor of our entryway last June, sorting through my daughter Lina’s suitcase after she drove home from her first year at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. The top layer held crumpled lecture notes with coffee stains down the margins, a half-eaten jar of pickled radishes she’d bought from the campus night market, and a 10-page printed course schedule marked up in neon pink. When I held it up and whistled at how many 8am classes she had, she rolled her eyes and said, “You think that’s a lot? My roommate who’s pre-med has 8am classes six days a week.”
I grew up going to a university in a smaller northern city in the 1990s, so I had my own outdated ideas. Back then, we had all classes scheduled for us by the department, almost no weekly assignments, and the whole year revolved around cramming for final exams. Most people I know outside China still think that’s how all Chinese universities work: rigid, focused only on memorization, no room for choice. That’s what I thought too, until Lina started calling me every other Sunday with updates.
Midway through her first semester, she called me frustrated, pacing around the campus lake. Her computer science group had a final app project due in two weeks, and she’d lost the booking for the 24-hour study room they’d needed. All the good rooms were booked by student clubs and other project groups two weeks in advance, and the only open space left was the noisy common room on her dorm floor, where half the floor was celebrating a birthday that week. I asked her why they didn’t just work in their dorm, and she said their dorm has an 11pm curfew for lights out, so they couldn’t stay there late. She ended up splitting the group into two pairs, working from different cheap coffee shops off-campus for three nights, and they still got an A on the project. But that moment drove home how different the system is now from when I was a student.
The biggest shift I’ve seen from my day is that almost all top universities moved to continuous assessment decades ago, and that’s only gotten more common. Half of Lina’s classes count weekly quizzes, group projects, and in-class participation toward 60% of her final grade, so you can’t just cram for one exam at the end of the semester. That means first years are often caught off guard, because everyone tells them “once you pass Gaokao you can relax” – that’s what all of us told Lina, too. So when she ended up busier than she was in senior year, she felt like she was doing something wrong at first. That’s a common mistake I see other parents make too: we brush off their stress because we bought into that old myth.
The first concrete thing I tell other parents now is to help your kid join the official department and class WeChat groups at least a month before term starts. Every single announcement, from last-minute assignment deadline changes to study room booking links to textbook deals, goes through those groups. Lina almost missed a required orientation session because she was only in an unofficial freshman group that didn’t share the update. Second, tell them to set aside 30 minutes every Sunday evening to scroll through the university’s online teaching platform. Professors often change rooms or deadlines there, and if you don’t check regularly, you’ll end up showing up to the wrong room for a quiz. Third, if they need textbooks, tell them to check the campus second-hand WeChat group first. Most upperclassmen sell their used textbooks for a quarter of the price new, and they’re already marked up with the important notes. That saves hundreds of yuan a semester, and a lot of hassle.
Another thing a lot of people don’t expect: there’s way more choice now than there used to be. Lina is a computer science major, but she gets to pick half of her courses from any department in the uni. She took a calligraphy class and a documentary film class this year just for fun, to balance out all the coding. She even joined a student hiking club that goes on trips every month, which is something that barely existed when I was in school. It’s not all rigid test prep, like a lot of outsiders think.
Of course, it’s not perfect. The competition for good grades and graduate school spots is still really intense. Lina told me half her class is already preparing for the postgraduate entrance exam in their second year, which adds a lot of extra pressure. Dorm rooms are usually shared between two to four people, so privacy is hard to come by if you’re used to having your own room. Curfews and rules about guests aren’t for everyone, either.
Last month, Lina was filling out applications for a student exchange program next year, and she paused and asked me if I thought she made the right choice staying in China for university instead of going abroad like a lot of her friends did. I told her it’s not a right or wrong choice, just a different one. She’s learned how to coordinate group projects with people from all over the country, how to juggle five deadlines in one week, and how to find cheap good food on a student budget. She’s still figuring out what she wants to do after graduation, whether that’s grad school in China, abroad, or going straight to work.
I still worry about her sometimes, when she calls me late at night tired after a long week of classes. But I also know that most of the advice I got before she started was outdated, so I just try to remind her of the small things: check your WeChat announcements on Sunday, book your study room early, and don’t skip meals just to finish a project. That’s enough, for now.
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