Light and Enlightenment: Yige Li ’17

I truly appreciate being a part of Westminster College’s enlightenment, which provides students a comprehensive education and a lifelong aspiration. The process of knowing you reminds me of Confucius, who had an ambition to educate developing leaders for a wide community. He had more than 3,000 disciples: some excelled in politics, some in eloquence, and others in arts and literature. Westminster College embodies this same spirit and offers groundbreaking educational methods for students to learn, think, and dream, both independently and collaboratively. I am honored to serve it.

One of my father’s favorite proverbs suggests, “Don’t just set your sights on those around you. Set your sights on this nation and on the world.” However, I did not fully understand his wisdom until high school. My father inspires me to discover myself and I recognize why. I served as Model UN ambassador, founded the charity club, and captained my cheerleading team. I have also been working as a TV host for 8 years, writing as a freethinker for 11 years, and dancing for 15 years. And I took AP© classes including Economy and Psychology in high school. They illuminate my sights to nature and humanity, truth and emotion, and domestic and worldwide education. The more I open myself for the world, the more it enlightens me. To my pleasure, there are profound curriculum and dynamic developmental experience to satisfy my process of self-discovery and intellectual curiosity for the world.

“Education is growth,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau said. My growth is a road of constant practicing, conjecturing, reflecting and appreciating the humanistic spirit. I want to follow a life path of observing, sympathizing, considering and improving the social pattern. My first choices of degree curriculum majors are Political Sciences and Transnational Studies, which provide me a compatible attractive curriculum and interdisciplinary study, I plan to integrate my previous knowledge, enhance my innovative learning, and establish a rigorous, scientific, and comprehensive thinking. I believe that they enable me to fully realize my goal: I want to be a skillful and equally thoughtful scholar, a person who sets his sights on the whole world, and embraces a global perspective and unique opportunities.

You also provide students a wide scope for activities. In particular, I wish to remain active in volunteering and join a charity organization; to exert my efforts furthering development of your Model UN Association based on my three-year involvement in MUN both as organizer and delegate; and I am eager to create a folk dance club so I can invite professors and students to exchange ethnic elegance and geographically diverse cultures.

A renowned local writer, Liao Hongji, inspired me when I was participating in “Cultural Tour in Taiwan” with his words: “Being at the scene can produce great power in writing.” Similarly, I agree with him since his view also applies to learning experiences.

Westminster College allows me to fully immerse into fascinating residential colleges, which my friends and I will appreciate for the harmony of intellectual, social, and cultural living and learning. I find a deep sense of joy and adventure in the formation of a new community. People of diverse interests and fields of study collaborate and live in the campus; years later they can happily recall how they, through incidents and happenings, became friends.