Wang’s story of no longer being Anderson’s ugly duckling

Lei Wang’s username on the Chinese website douban.com tells a bit about her life story. She is this year’s sole recipient of the Orange Tulip Scholarship Award at the UT, and says in elementary school, she was just an ‘average student’ with ‘average grades’ like the ugly duckling in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, but over time, she slowly began to be viewed in a much different light.

The award winner sat down to chat while sipping hot tea made with hand-rolled green tea leaves on a late Sunday afternoon at Witbreuksweg 399, a peaceful place on the outskirts of campus known informally as the ‘International House’. 

Since its establishment in 2008, the Orange Tulip Scholarship (OTS) Award has aimed to finance top Chinese students to follow a bachelor or master’s degree program in the Netherlands at 12 top Dutch universities. Remarkably, Wang won the €20,000 scholarship to be divided over a two year period out of 30 other candidates. In the past, the University of Twente has provided five OTS awards with a €5,000 tuition fee waiver out of 20 candidates. But after the selection was made for this year’s candidates, most of the five chose for other better offers, hence, the scholarship committee decided to increase the amount of the award and select only one winner.

Wang attended the Tang Shan No. 1 High School, one of the oldest middle schools in modern Chinese history. Her father asked probing questions about her future plans after she had graduated, and said to her: ‘As a girl, you have to have skills to live in this world. Do you like science?’ She answered, ‘I prefer technology. I don’t really want to be purely a scientist, but I like engineers.” Her father replied: ‘Psychics or chemistry?’ She said: ‘Working with chemicals is much more interesting. You can perform experiments in the laboratory.’

Simple laboratory experiments have always captivated Wang‘s interest for their intrinsic practical application to solve real world problems and commercial use in the marketplace. ‘Take for instance,’ she says, ‘a simple experiment like the separation process used to transform a mixture of substances into two or more distinct products. You can take water and oil and try to mix them together, and then you separate them again. You can perform this molecular process in the laboratory and put the end results into practice by applying the process to add value in any commercial market, and your work becomes meaningful. In body lotion products, key ingredients form a mixture of water and oils. We can try to find a way to reduce the time in which they separate.’

Just then, a Chinese man walks to her terrace door on the first floor to ask if she’d like to play basketball and casually introduces himself only as ‘Lei’. Shortly after he walks away, she explains that most Chinese students studying in Western countries prefer to go by their last name to avoid confusion.

Wang plans to follow over the next few months, the Chemical Engineering Process Technology Track to enhance her interest in particle technology and polymers. She served as a research assistant in the Key Laboratory at Xiamen University under the instruction of Dr. Li Jun.

She is no taller than 159 cm. with petite feet and tiny hands, yet strangely enough, enjoys to play pick-up games of basketball, refusing to play with Dutch players-not because she wouldn’t like to-but she says the Dutch are ‘simply too tall’ and it doesn’t work. Wang’s other interests are singing traditional Chinese songs, reading travel books and the poems of Guozhen Wang, and on occasion, listening to her all-time favorite song, John Lennon’s ‘Let it be’.

Associate Professor in International Business Management Sirp de Boer, left, and Lei Wang, 24, at the Orange Tulip Scholarship Awarding ceremony at the Beijing Embassy on 19 June.

China’s most popular networking website, douban.com

Douban.com was launched in 2005 and differs distinctively from other social networks such as the Dutch Hyves, Facebook or My Space. Worldwide users post only profile images of themselves- no personal photographs- and the site is thought of as a place where creative types can rate books and music, post blogs and events, take part in discussion groups and form fan pages of brands.  On the top icon bar user can select various topics to explore, such as community, books, movies, opinions and radio.

The CEO and product developer, Ah Bei, who studied for his PhD in Physics at the University of California, based the content on user-generated material with few edits being done on the content. The site has 3,560,665 million users coming from mainland China, 399 in the Netherlands and has 30 million unique visitors a month. Most of the around 200 Chinese students studying in Enschede regularly visit the site to connect to family, friends and events taking place in their respective cities.