International Club president leads with poise, confidence

All around swirls of brightly colored costumes, bold soccer jerseys declaring fierce loyalties, and loud, fiery Latin music surrounded Front Campus on International Day. But Scott Zhang sat coolly aside and helped keep one of the biggest events of the year for the International Club running smoothly.

Zhang, the International Club president, had a big hand in helping plan and organize this year’s International Day. Zhang, a very collected, well-spoken sophomore computer science major with a face quick to smile, has taken on leadership roles throughout the campus, including working as a summer conference assistant, and participating in the Leadership Certificate Program.

“I have a lot of respect for him,” said Libby Davis, associate director of the International Education Center and an international student adviser, “not only did he take on a leadership role, he took on the leadership role.”

Zhang is not afraid of taking on hard tasks to get the job done including walking the four miles to Walmart and back to buy food when the shuttles were stopped and Sodexo was closed over winter break.

Coming to the United States and living on an American college campus has been a very different experience for Zhang since being in China, he said, “school is so stressful and no one has time for extracurricular activities.”

Zhang sees the opportunity to get involved on campus as a positive change from life in China, and has taken the opportunity and ran with it.

“There would never be an International Club in China,” Zhang said, laughing.

Zhang came to Milledgeville from one of the largest cities in the world – Shanghai, China. He came to the United States at his parent’s urging to gain a sense of independence most young Chinese students seem to lack, Zhang said.

Zhang attributes the dependence of young Chinese on their families to China’s One Child Policy, which he says creates spoiled children. Zhang’s parents’ solution to this was to help him come to the United States to study.

Coming to the United States from a communist country is actually more common than an average American may think. Zhang does not get questioned about communism very often. “We aren’t North Korea,” he said.

“China is one of the top three countries (with students) who come to America,” Davis said.

Davis said it is not communism in the case of China that stops people from coming to the United States, it is usually the economic situation.

It is much easier to come to the United States now than it was just a little while ago when China’s economy was less stable.

The U.S. is concerned mostly about whether immigrants will go back when their visa is up instead of illegally staying on the country. Now that China is strong economically, the U.S. officials seem more assured that immigrants will return to China when their visa is up.

“(China) is in a transition,” Zhang said, and that because China is doing well with capitalism, one day communism and capitalism will clash and communism will fade away.

Zhang saw the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a milestone in the struggle between capitalism and communism. Though the Chinese government used the Olympics as a propaganda tool, Zhang said, it also boosted the economy and let people learn more about what China is really like.

The International Club has the same goal in mind – to help international and American students understand more of each other’s cultures.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Dec 4 2009. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry