JIANG Yan comes from a special family in Sichuan province. Her father has been suffering from various diseases and must take medication to maintain his health condition all year round. Her mother has been suffering from mental illness since Yan was born. Everyone in the village said that Yan’s mother got sick because she was not a boy, which made her extremely sad but also stimulated her to work hard and be strong like a boy. As the second daughter of the family, she witnessed her parents' pain since childhood and wanted to lead her family out of difficulty. Her family was very poor, but that never stopped her. Instead, it made her work harder for opportunities and become more and more confident. She started boarding school at the age of 12, earning a scholarship to support herself and be self-sufficient. Now, she is working part-time to provide financial support for her family.
Yan has loved mathematics since she was young, showing strong logical thinking and creativity. She is currently studying Statistics and Data Science at the best Statistics college in China, and is looking forward to continuing her mathematics studies in the future. At the same time, she keeps her interest in Chemistry growing by learning on her own in her spare time. Her current goal, after graduation, is to study at the University of California, Berkeley—ideally with a full scholarship—where Statistics and Chemistry are both at the highest academic level in the world, and for which she admires the academic freedom and quality education. Yan has been constantly striving for this goal. In her first two semesters, her GPA ranked first in her college. She is trying to do research and write papers, and, currently, she is the only student in her major who has taken initiative to find a professor as academic advisor. Yan doesn’t forget to enrich life outside classrooms and library. In her spare time, she enjoys reading prose, watching movies, playing table tennis, and drawing visual diary. She also joined the school's "Seeking Truth From Sources" talent training program, where every summer vacation, she would go to other places to do research. This opportunity would take her from small inland villages to coastal cities to foreign countries. She is curious about key problems in the world and wants to make a difference. Yan is optimistic in heart. She always smiles even when she faces challenges. “I am so lucky, always. Just be brave, fake it, until you are. Try hard and everything will be fine eventually.” She also spends a lot of time doing volunteer work as she wants to share her luck with others. Paying it forward is the best return to those who helped her. |