Advice to Future UWC Students

Hey loves!

After graduating from LPC, I thought a lot about the beginning of my UWC journey. About how I first met all these amazing people I know have the privilege to call my friends. About my first time entering the room. And eating Dim Sum. And riding the MTR. There is so much to remember from this journey and I look back at most of my memories with a smile. While looking back, I realised that there is a list of things I wish I had known before attending LPCUWC. I put together a little video for you guys which outlines the things I wish someone had told me before I got on a plane to Hong Kong.

I believe that the most important advice to any future UWC student is to actively put themselves out there to have a UWC experience. Quite a few students seem to expect to be handed a UWC experience once they arrive at their respective college, but that is not how it works. It’s the student’s responsibility to sign up for talks, activities, and outings to build their UWC experience. The college only provides the resources to create a UWC experience - it’s the students who have to make use of them.

I think that looking at the concept of a UWC experience with this in mind will also turn you into a more responsible and independent person. Why? Because you take responsibility for your UWC experience and start putting effort into building it. It makes you make conscious choices about which events to attend and which not to attend. These choices can be hard - how do you choose between a talk by a human rights activist, a workshop by a persecuted artist, and a conversation with an environmental activist?

In order to make these choices a little easier, I wrote down my priorities for my UWC time and decided according to them. Did an event align with my priorities? Or did I work enough on my priorities to justify deciding without consulting them? Depending on my answers to these questions, I would either attend an event or not. Such a method helps you to stay focused on what you really want and ensures that you will not look back at your UWC experience and feel like you have waisted it.

It is important to review these priorities every semester because your goals and priorities might change. UWC will likely change you and may make you choose a different direction in life. So make sure to adjust your priorities to these changes. But in order to turn your priorities into real commitments, only change them at the end of the semester. You do not want to adjust them for short-term desires like watching a new episode on Netflix. Sticking to them for a longer period of time will also ensure that you can see whether living by your priorities is enjoyable for you. If not, reflect on whether all your priorities are truly your priorities. Many people put things on their list of priorities that are not truly their priorities but the priorities but the priorities of people close to them who hope that they will achieve this. But if living by these priorities does not really make you happy, do you really want to waste your UWC experience by pursuing them?

I put some more suggestions in the video, but I thought that I would limit the article itself to the most important points of the video. If you guys have any questions about my advice or my UWC experience, please feel free to message me.

Lots of Love,

Elena