Young China by Zak Dychtwald

Author:Zak Dychtwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

8

Test Monsters Dream of Innovation

Will China’s Superstudents Reinvent Their Country?

When Lin Lin sat down at the table, her eyes surveyed my tape recorder and notepad in one deliberate sweep. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” she said in lightly accented English. She slipped her backpack straps over the back of her chair, placed a book with a light blue cover on the table, and promptly rested her hand on top. A portrait of a young woman peeked out from beneath her fingers. Before I could get a good look, her résumé materialized on the table for my perusal. The server arrived. Lin Lin ordered an apple juice.

I was interviewing Lin Lin because I was working on behalf of the Columbia University admissions office. My small role was to speak with students, primarily in western China, who had made it through the first few stages of the college admission process. After each interview I wrote a report, one of many components that comprise the strange alchemy of a Columbia University admissions decision.

“Your SAT scores are quite good,” I said, looking over her materials. “Was taking the test in English difficult for you?”

The young woman across from me smiled broadly, revealing a full mouth of braces. “The test portion was OK, but I struggled with the writing portion.”

I looked down at her résumé. She had gotten a perfect score. In fact, she had gotten a perfect score on the whole test. Of the nearly 1.7 million prospective college students to take the test that year, Lin Lin was one of the 583 who had earned a perfect score—2400. And she took the test in her second language.*

“Of what achievement or experience are you most proud?” I asked Lin Lin.

“My book sales and my scholarship fund,” she replied. The young woman pictured on the book cover beneath her palm was, in fact, Lin Lin. Love You on the Moor, a book of poems, written in English, inspired by the Victorian authors and poets she loved to read in middle school, was published when Lin Lin was fifteen.

Lin Lin had spearheaded the advertising and sales efforts for Love You on the Moor. She began with a book sale at school. She explained, “I was really nervous because I worried that the students would not accept my poetry, which took me years to complete. However, I convinced myself to give it a try, because, after all, the worst that would happen would be failure. I did lots of preparation work beforehand, practicing a sales speech and making a roll-up banner.” On the day of the sale she gave a rousing speech in front of her homemade banner and sold 325 copies to a student body of only eight hundred. Riding high on that success, she contacted Dangdang, one of China’s biggest online booksellers, and asked it to sell her book on its site; she used the sales she made at school to demonstrate the book’s potential. Dangdang agreed. With the proceeds from the book

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.