This year marks an exciting opportunity for a program that has brought in top talent from China for over a decade. After five years of being virtual, the Greater China Scholars Weekend will be held in Beijing in person. The event is an exciting opportunity to welcome and engage with Greater China's best and brightest young scholars.

The Greater China Scholars (GCS) program is the University's premiere merit scholars program for international undergraduate students. It began in 2011 and continues to run today as a fully endowed program thanks to generous support from the Li Ka Shing Foundation, the HS Chau Foundation, and numerous alumni, parents, and friends. To date, it has brought in 126 students who have not only excelled in their time at the University of Notre Dame but have also gone on to do remarkable work in their fields.

Students have come from 70 different high schools in Greater China, and over the years, $4.5 million has been given to the scholars in awards and scholarships. While notable, the success of this program isn’t only found in the numbers—it’s also in the impact and experiences of the students themselves.

A 2016 Notre Dame graduate, Huili Chen was one of the first students to participate in the GCS program. In her words, it was through serendipity that she discovered Notre Dame. It was uncommon for students to go to the US to study abroad in Guizhou, China where she grew up, but Huili was motivated to see all her options, so she turned to the U.S. News & World Report’s national university rankings. Browsing through the top 50 schools, she explored websites and listened to her gut. When she came across Notre Dame, something clicked.

“When I looked at the motto, it’s just so different from other schools,” she remembers. “The English translation is ‘Life, sweetness, and hope.’ The moment I read it, it literally touched my heart.” She was moved by the way Notre Dame wasn’t just promising an impressive degree but a meaningful college experience as well. One of the ways she noted Notre Dame lived this out was through the University’s focus on social justice.

“It resonated with some work I did in my hometown for many years around social justice and cultural heritage work,” Huili says, highlighting another reason the University stood out to her. Through the Greater China Scholars Weekend, she was able to get more information about what life would look like as a Notre Dame student, and she was sold.

"Liberal arts education and world-class research opportunities...That's the niche of Notre Dame." —Huili Chen '16

Huili spent five years on campus and graduated with two undergraduate degrees from Notre Dame, one in computer science and one in psychology, and she also tacked on a minor in International Peace Studies. While at Notre Dame, she co-founded the University’s first social service program in her home province of Guizhou, studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, volunteered in a wildlife sanctuary in Costa Rica, and interned for Impact Network in rural Zambia. She went on to do postgraduate research at MIT and received her Ph.D., and last year, became a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Now, she is doing a Presidential Fellowship at Princeton University working in the cognitive sciences program.

Despite continuing her studies at other top universities, Huili insists that the opportunities Notre Dame offers are rare. “At Notre Dame, I worked with multiple professors in terms of researching in both psychology department and computer science,” she says. Through working directly with her professors, rather than having them simply oversee her project, she was able to learn from them how to think like a researcher rather than just how to do research. What sets Notre Dame apart from other schools, Huili says, is that relationship with her professors, along with the freedom she had to take her time choosing the right fields of study.

“If you think about these two—liberal arts education and world-class research opportunities—it’s like liberal arts gives you the horizon of the world, so you know what happens in the world and different, diverse ways of understanding and making sense of the world. And the research opportunities give you this depth. That’s the niche of Notre Dame.”

Ultimately, what Huili shares surprised her the most was “the kindness of people, not just professors but all the staff members and students as well.”

Greater China Scholar Yuxuan (Lucas) Bai, a freshman who is only just starting his journey at Notre Dame, echoed Huili’s sentiment. During his first week on campus, he says that he got to know individuals “who are probably the most friendly people I’ve ever met in my life.” He shares how moved he was that his RA and rector knew his name and even his hometown right away.

"College is a journey that can nourish your spirit and soul as well as your mind." —Yuxuan (Lucas) Bai '28

Lucas first learned about Notre Dame through participating in the Pioneer Summer Research Program, through which he conducted research under the guidance of Notre Dame College of Engineering Professor Anthony Hoffman. He shares that after their meetings, the two would chat about Notre Dame and what the campus community is like.

“He really taught me a lot,” Lucas says, emphasizing how Professor Hoffman’s insights went beyond the academic side of things. ”He taught me the four years in college is a journey that can nourish your spirit and soul as well as your mind.”

At Notre Dame, Lucas was confident he’d find a community to aid in that endeavor. That knowledge, along with the GCS program, were the primary reasons Lucas chose the University. Just over a semester in, he hasn’t been disappointed, and that’s largely due to the “genuinely good people” he shares he’s found here, and the academic and research opportunities he’s already been able to pursue, such as at the IDEA Center.

As Lucas’ experience reflects, the GCS program is intentionally built to provide Scholars not just with a scholarship, but also with a full range of enrichment and mentorship programming to enhance their spiritual, intellectual, and leadership capacities throughout their undergraduate studies at Notre Dame.

The GCS program is the capstone of a strong relationship that Notre Dame has been steadily building with China since Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., a prolific Notre Dame president, first visited in the 1970s. At that time, his work was focused on creating a network of partners and prospective students in China, and just a few years later, Notre Dame undergraduates were granted the opportunity to go to China to study abroad. Today, eight different Chinese programs spanning Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong all welcome undergraduate students.

The University’s relationship with China deepened with the establishment of two intellectual hubs—Notre Dame Beijing in 2012 and Notre Dame Hong Kong in 2014. Since then, the number of partnerships and research collaborations has grown thanks to the efforts of the staff positioned at those locations. Most recently, ND Beijing has been actively working with Notre Dame’s International Student and Scholar Affairs team to plan the Greater China Scholars Weekend.

Huili and Lucas’ experiences are just a snapshot of the impact of the GCS program, but their stories and other students’ demonstrate the great value of fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between universities and institutions across the globe. As Notre Dame looks to the future, expanding and deepening these relationships will continue to be a priority.

For more information about Notre Dame Global’s Greater China Scholars program, please visit the website or contact Miranda Ma.

Originally published by Jessie Carson at beijing.nd.edu on February 13, 2025.