Xiangsan Liang, a first-year graduate student in fluid dynamics from the city of Hangzhou near Shanghai, says that he was attracted to Harvard by the high caliber of the University's faculty.

"My adviser is the founding father of physical fluid dynamics," Liang says. "I just wanted to study with the best adviser in the best university in the world."

Liu contrasts the interdisciplinary nature of the University with Chinese universities' academic and social focus on one subject.

She says she enjoys the opportunity to meet a diverse student population and the freedom to take classes and attend seminars on disciplines far from one's field.

"In my dorm, I'm living with musicians, anthropologists," Liu says. "I find the mix very nice.... I feel myself becoming much more open and tolerant than I used to be."

A Different World

For most students, life in the U.S. and Harvard has been a positive experience, but not without its own travails.

Xiangsan Liang brought up cultural differences that Chinese students face in a foreign country as well in a reference to Hailei Ge, a Chinese graduate student who committed suicide early December.

"Asian people tend to be shy. When they have problems, they do not speak up... they are not brought up to be individualistic, like Americans," Liang says. "So, dealing with freedom can be extremely hard."

But Huang Haibo, a seventh-year physics student from Shanghai, said he had no hang-ups about life in the U.S.

Haibo credits his ease adjusting to his background growing up in an academic milieu where travel abroad was common.

"Both my parents are professors at Fudan University," he says. "So many [at Fudan] went abroad, I was fortunate enough to get an accurate picture of what life was like before I actually came here."

But he added that students from Central Chinese cities less international than Shanghai might run into difficulties.

Xiaobing Chen mentions the possible advantages of some time spent in the U.S.

"You need language practice," he says. "It's very difficult at first."