911爆料网

By Kirstin Fawcett (AGI26)

Beyond the hard-earned diploma, the don rags, and the ability to spout an applicable Aristotle quote at the drop of a hat, what makes a Johnnie, well, a Johnnie? Omnivorous curiosity, independent thought, and the drive to tackle new challenges for starters—personality traits that come part and parcel with the type of person who aspires to read over 200 texts in just four years.

Shuangyi Li (SF15) was a Johnnie at heart and in practice long before she heard of the Program. Yet Li was also a self-described “middle school dropout” from China’s rural Guizhou province who hadn’t stepped inside a classroom in years. How, then, did she wind up at St. John’s Santa Fe? By way of the Great Books, and a serendipitous encounter with an educator who saw her belonging there long before she did.

Li is a recent graduate of University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and she currently works as an associate consultant with McKinsey & Company. She chose this career path after working for seven years in housing nonprofits, government contracting, and business development for the arts—experiences that capped an adolescence’s worth of autodidactic learning.

The grandchild of exiled Cultural Revolution dissidents, Li’s family history resulted in criticism and physical assault from peers. She Since education is compulsory for youth in China, Li’s family had taken a calculated gamble by allowing her to leave the classroom. No longer a student, it was not safe for her to be visible in society.

Li couldn’t venture outside her parents’ house too often without risking exposure, so she began exploring the world through other means—namely, the library. “The province where I’m from is very cut off from the rest of the world,” Li says. “And after I dropped out of school, I was even more cut off. What that did was to prompt me to build my own curriculum: to build my own middle school, to build my own high school.”

Li found solace in Shakespeare, committing plays and sonnets to memory between attaining mastery of the guzheng, a complex Chinese string instrument. As for foreign language instruction, she grew fluent in English by watching the BBC. But while Li was able to transform her own home into a high school, “I didn’t really dare to think about any sort of higher education,” Li recalls, “because, I thought, how would that be possible?”

Li occasionally succumbed to loneliness and boredom, and she risked detection to perform voluntary translation work with an international animation festival held annually in her hometown. That’s how she first crossed paths in 2008 with American medical illustrator and animator David Bolinsky, the creator of the widely viewed 3D “The Inner Life of the Cell” video for Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Technically, Li wasn’t supposed to be on Bolinsky’s tour bus during the conference. A new rule required translation volunteers to be college students—which she, of course, wasn’t—but she had donned the prior year’s event shirt and slipped aboard hoping no one would notice. Thankfully, Li wound up grabbing Bolinsky’s attention after sitting down next to him and asking an unconventional icebreaker question: “Do you know the duration of the word antidisestablishmentarianism and how it might apply to China today?” The more the two chatted during their hours-long tour of the southwestern province’s waterfalls and sculpture gardens, the more impressed Bolinsky became of Li’s intellect and initiative—and the more convinced that she deserved a chance to share them with the world.

Li and Bolinsky kept in touch following the conference. The medical animator had a long history of youth mentorship; he gradually took Li under his wing as well, returning multiple times to China to meet with the teen and her parents. Bolinsky, along with his wife and children in Connecticut, would eventually become Li’s adopted “American” family. In the meantime, their main objective was getting Li into college in the U.S., somewhere a teen of her caliber could thrive. But while Li checked all the application boxes she could, even traveling to Hong Kong to take the SAT in her late teens, she still had no visa. Without one, she had few hopes of attending university.

Things began looking up in 2011 after Bolinsky and Li met an expat college professor in Hong Kong named Lon Hodge. After listening to Li’s story, Hodge suggested that she take a chance and apply to an unorthodox college he knew would surely appreciate her self-directed educational path: St. John’s College. Sure enough, St John’s admitted Li with an 80 percent scholarship that year, and she soon after received a student visa. (Due to complications with said visa, Li enrolled in the Santa Fe campus as a January Freshman in 2012 after delays made it impossible to matriculate on time in Annapolis.)

At St. John’s Santa Fe, Li recognized as Hodge did that that a signature component of the St. John’s experience mirrored her own. Reading the Great Books alongside peers and tutors required “going straight back to the source,” she explains. “Nobody was there to digest it for you. You had to train your own mind to think about what to believe, what not to believe, to develop the framework you’ll use to understand the world. Books are thrown at you that may make one argument, and then other ones will make another. I was used to that type of learning and appreciated it.”

Li soon realized she could build a career upon that style of thinking and learning as she grew familiar with the field of management consulting and decided to pursue an MBA after cutting her teeth in the business world post-graduation. Positions at companies like McKinsey piqued her interest: interdisciplinary, stimulating, and requiring associates to tackle tough problems while maintaining an open perspective. These qualities, innate to Johnnies and nurtured by the Program, is what makes Li—and, by extension, other St. John’s graduates—naturals for the field, she says.

Li frequently utilizes AI in her line of work and is “very interested in the intersection between tech and humanity,” she says. Examples of how she might integrate AI technology into day-to-day operations include using it for strategic workforce planning, creating new lines of business, and developing new products for clients. A strong interest in AI might seem paradoxical for someone who transformed their life through reading, but Li says her Johnnie education gave her the tools she needed to thrive in a rapidly changing world. “A lot of basic jobs are going to go away because of new AI technology,” Li says. “So, we’re in a world where there’s no single golden skill set. What you realize ... is the ability to be malleable in your thinking and learn and challenge yourself constantly—that is the golden skill set.”

Plus, Li adds, the Great Books are ultimately all about what it means to be human. And thanks to the Program, Johnnies spend four years contemplating exactly that. “As machines become smarter, we need to be hyper-focused on who we are as human beings; that’s what we need—physically, mentally—for any products or services to be viable in the future,” Li says. “We’re not building worlds for computers; we’re building a world for humans and all the pros and cons and boundaries of our existence.”

Li is now based in Dallas, Texas, as the regional airport allows for convenient access to the East and West coasts for work trips. After her long journey from China to New Mexico to Virginia to Texas, it seems only fitting that she would remain a traveler.