SEU Story | Eric Song: An outlander and a native Nanjinger
Eric Song (Song Tiancheng) is a PhD student from School of Electrical Engineering. As a native Nanjinger born and raised in this city, Eric holds deep affection for Nanjing, his hometown and for Southeast University, his teenage paradise. After so many years abroad, Eric was lucky to come back to Nanjing and pursue his further education in SEU in 2016. Though he is now staying in Canada due to COVID-19 pandemic, he will never call it an end to his story with SEU.
Here is his story.
01
SEU Sipailou, is probably one of the most familiar places in my life, if someone asked me before I left in 2008. I spent my entire junior and senior high school teenage years somewhere less than 1 kilometre nearby, and it used to be my paradise after school as a routine, street foods, basketball time with friends, and so much more.
In 2016, I finally came back to this "familiar" place and became part of it as a first-year master student. Everything all the sudden seemed familiar but somehow unfamiliar. I still remember exactly the first day in SEU doing the enrollment registration for College of International Students (CIS) in Chengxian Street, when Mr. Cai Yifeng from the International Students Management Office greeted me in a strong Nanjing dialect and asked, "Are you a Nanjinger?" I knew I was at home at that very moment.
Why unfamiliar? I came back to Nanjing only twice in the past 6 years. When I walked out of CIS, most of my go-to restaurants or food stands were all gone, the only ones survived I could recall were the Muslim restaurant across CIS and the fried rice restaurant near Wenchang Dorm area. Most importantly, I used to be a high school teenager looking up at the SEUers as "big brothers and sisters", but 10 years later, most students were probably younger than me. It truly gave me some special feelings that day.
02
I am lucky enough to have Prof. Gao Shan as my supervisor in SEU. He is an expert in the field of electrical engineering. In common sense, I was supposed to know much more than the basics to get a ticket to his lab. Well, the hard truth is, I went on board with him with empty pockets. Please don't get me wrong as the pockets refer to the engineering knowledge instead of coins and bills. No doubt, it took him lots of courage to recruit a kid from Canada with the Agricultural Economics background, which the majority may find no correlation between the two including myself.
Prof. Gao has always been very patient with answering my questions, from basic electrical circuit to static state analysis, neither one of us gave up. As an "outsider" stepped into this unfamiliar field during halftime, I finished all my PhD courses with the highest GPA among all 2019 PhD students from School of Electrical Engineering. I believe it would be a "mission impossible" without his persistence and tremendous guidance, as a mentor and as a friend.
03
Since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in January 2020, I have been staying in Vancouver, Canada and my original plan was to spend the Chinese New Year here with the family. Once I heard the outbreak in the motherland, I thought I must do something. Our Nanjing people's community in Vancouver led by Mr. Zhang Rongcheng, drove miles across the province for purchasing medical supplies, which were in great shortage in China at that time.
We finally delivered them to the Vancouver airport, and made sure they went on board with the last flight from Vancouver to Nanjing (China Eastern MU216) on February 9, 2020 before the indefinite flight suspension. These donations were designated to hospitals and communities in need, including Zhongda Hospital SEU.
When the pandemic outbreak turned around and started here in Canada, I received many medical supplies and letters from Jiangsu People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and Nanjing Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese. Reading the warm letters in Chinese words overseas, everything seemed familiar to me again, just like the motherland was by my side at the very moment.
Written by Eric Song
Revised by Song Chunyi
Proofread by Melody Zhang
Edited by Sha Lu
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