Along with other international students, they bring new perspectives, cultural experiences, and knowledge that are transforming colleges and universities across the country, including BU, into vibrant global campuses. And colleges are adapting to meet their needs. To help Mandarin-speaking students from China integrate into campus life, many colleges are revamping dining hall menus, adding writing tutors, and creating videos that explain American college culture.
At BU, the cross-cultural experience of globalization—language barriers and breakthroughs, misunderstandings, connections, and learning—plays out day by day, in residence halls (student dormitory), classrooms, at the George Sherman Union (BU primary location for meetings and social functions).

Global campuses benefit everyone, education experts say. “The careers of all our students will be global ones,” says Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “They will need to understand the cultural differences and historical experiences that divide us, as well as the common values and humanity that unite us.”

Ge and the other students from China are the only sons and daughters of their country’s rising middle class and its more than three decades of economic growth and open-door and one-child policies. Middle-class parents can afford not just cars and international travel, but the commodity most prized by their culture, with its Confucian-inspired reverence for learning: education. Specifically, US higher education.
For many of these young people, who are growing up in a global world, going to college abroad is all but expected these days. Ge graduated from Nanjing Foreign Language High School, considered one of the top high schools in China. Of the 400 seniors in her class, more than 280 have enrolled in colleges abroad, primarily in the United States. She is one of several students from her high school who are BU freshmen this year.
“Our principal teaches us to be open to the whole world,” Ge says, “but we should always keep our Chinese spirit.”

Students from China, a country with 1.3 billion people, are as diverse as any of their classmates from the United States, or for that matter, from India, Europe, or Africa. They are bright, ambitious, hardworking, curious, and paradoxical. They embrace American culture—Starbucks, NBA basketball, The Big Bang Theory—and at the same time they are deeply, proudly Chinese.
In one breath, Ge quotes Steve Jobs: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” In the next, she channels Confucius: “‘It’s all about being kind and generous—not to be selfish.’ ‘If you study, don’t just read something once. Read over many times.’”

Shanghai girls, with their hip-hop style and bold attitudes, could be New York girls. “Shanghai girls are independent, and they know what they want,” says Lu (SHA’15, SMG’15), who spent her junior year of high school as an exchange student in Indiana and wants a high-powered career in hospitality management.
Students from China are interested in business administration, economics, and math—and literature, language, education, journalism, psychology, music, and any number of other subjects.

BUCSSA president Nick Haisu Yuan (CAS’14, COM’14), a double major in economics and film, wants to be a filmmaker like his hero Martin Scorsese. “I want to make films that tell stories about China—how China really is,” he says. He is passionate about Sichuan food—he is from Chongqing—and may dabble in food criticism, too.
Parents of students from China are lawyers, teachers, government workers, entrepreneurs, real estate developers, and small businessmen who have poured all their faith in education into their only children. The expectation is that many of these children will eventually return home, with their coveted degrees and Western knowledge, to help their families—and build a better China.

“If you have money, you buy education,” Li says. “You buy the best. They think US higher education is the best.”
International students are not eligible for need-based financial aid at BU and many other US colleges. Parents from China invest every possible working hour and all their savings—and they are a generation of savers—to send their children here. They hope that a BU degree will provide an edge in the competition for jobs in China, or in the United States. With Chinese real estate values reaching stratospheric levels in the past decade or so, some parents sell apartments they had bought when the market was low in order to pay for BU.

In China, where brand names carry great weight, Boston University is a top brand name. Students from China, who are almost all the first ones in their families to go to college in the United States, track the U.S. News & World Report rankings even more closely than do kids here.
Case in point: in September 2013, Kelly A. Walter, BU associate vice president and executive director of admissions, was on one of her regular recruitment trips to China. She walked into Beijing School No. 4 shortly after the latest U.S. News rankings were announced. The students were abuzz over BU’s 10-point jump.

Parents expect BU to help their children develop habits of mind they associate with US education—critical thinking, creativity—which they say are not encouraged by China’s system, with its emphasis on rote learning, a teacher’s authority, and grueling high-stakes exams. It can be challenging, though, to spend 12 years learning to succeed in one system and then to be expected to think in very different ways at BU. Freewheeling class discussions and challenging authority may be new for students from China, who, as Li writes in her book, come from a culture that prizes humility and listening as important learning virtues.

Ge’s parents migrated to Nanjing, an eastern city with more than five million people. Their apartment, in a new, gated complex, is a 15-minute drive from the skyscrapers of central Nanjing—and a few minutes’ walk from a restored section of a 14th-century Ming dynasty wall. China, land of contrasts. It’s a cliché, but it’s accurate.

BU has two campus - Charles River Campus and Medical Campus (it is where BU medical school and dental school are located). BU campus is huge. But you can go classes without driving. BU offers BU shuttle bus runs through campus. Also, you can take subway trolley train which runs along the campus, or bike, even scooter.

Here are some pictures at BU student residence/dormitory.