“过来人”用亲身经历引导新生

Liu Jieyu

Warren1998@126.com

Under the present trend of Chinese youth studying abroad, agencies designed to help students who are studying abroad often appear in prospective students’ view. A profitable link has been formed between returnees providing these services and the prospective students benefiting from them.

However, besides the rising profitable agencies, there are some groups of students striving to share the benefits of their experience while continuing to study abroad, instead of creating organizations purely for profit, Panopath being one of them.

Panopath, a group of overseas students originally founded as an official WeChat account, strives to equalize the imbalance of information between prospective students and the schools overseas.

“I was in a Liberal Arts school during my college years,” said Li Shengyue, co-founder of Panopath. “At the beginning, we just wanted to write messages on the official WeChat account to speak our voice, but many people followed our official account.”

Li, currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, described the original essence of Panopath as a platform for proving their existence, because people rarely know about Liberal Arts schools.

After gaining attention from the students, Li thought it was time for them to publicize the platform.

The offline meetup of both prospective students and continuing overseas students, known as Panofair, was held in Shenzhen for the second time last Sunday, attracting hundreds of continuing overseas students and prospective students to the scene to engage in quality conversations.

“The students and the atmosphere here in Shenzhen shocked me very much,” said Wang Yuchen, general director of Panofairs in China.

Both Wang Yuchen and Li agreed that Panofair provides a great platform for students to discuss amongst themselves. At that time, there was no pressure from parents and no money involved, only pure joy.

On the other hand, Wang Yuxuan, the associate director of the Shenzhen Panofair, was responsible for all of the paperwork and communication with the students before and after.

“Although I can feel the pressure from the students and the parents at the scene,” said Wang Yuxuan. “I can also see and hear the lovely words and laughter at the scene.”

All of the directors somehow described Panofair as a place to find similarities with each other and also a place to make good friendships before arriving at their respective colleges.

Through many of the online and offline events, Panopath has survived because of the new and definitive essence of Panopath as an authentic atmosphere that brings out the loving heart inside of everyone, according to Wang Yuchen.

In the current fast food society and culture, even education can be utilized by agencies to make a profit. Adjacent to those agencies, Panopath was founded as a group of overseas students and maintains their authentic and loving hearts by refusing to stray from their path for profit.

“Panopath is a group made up of overseas students, by overseas students and for overseas students,” said Li.