Highlighting Excellence

Our students are pretty great!

As we start the Spring Semester of the 2023-2024 school year, and as my time writing for the Pacifican winds to a close, I would like to take some time to highlight the excellence of our student body, our faculty, and our administration. To that end, I would like to introduce everyone to Youyou Xu. Youyou is a fellow member of the class of 2024; they are pursuing a Psychology major with a minor in pre-law. At the University of the Pacific, they have served as ASUOP’s Director of Academic Affairs, a research assistant in the Psychology Department, and a research assistant for the University Office of DEI. In addition, Youyou is a Pacific Humanities Scholar and a Legal Scholar.  

Youyou took their first Psychology course in a dual enrollment program through a community college. It was one of the first classes they took and truly enjoyed, despite being in high school. They thought that being able to categorize and understand behavior scientifically would have many policy applications. In turn, that belief inspired their interest in law and decision to select a minor in Pre-Law. Youyou believed that understanding legal rhetoric and graduating with a psychology degree would be incredibly funny and valuable, allowing them to kill two birds with one stone.  

As well as their on-campus involvements, Youyou participated in PREDOC’s summer course on data science, offered by Harvard economic professors Raj Chetty and Gregory Bruich. They also studied the STATA software and its application to analyses of larger data sets and the implications of quasi-experimental research on policy.  

Among their most outstanding achievements at the University, Youyou lists their work on a whitepaper created for the University Office of DEI, in collaboration with VP Dr. Lomax-Ghiraduzzi, and their position with ASUOP as the Director of Academic Affairs. Before coming to Pacific, Youyou had never been asked for their expertise in topics and had never been expected to be a reliable source of information. Youyou believes that these achievements represent how much they have grown in their educational journey and how widely they can apply the things they have learned, both inside and outside of academia.  

Youyou is a first-generation immigrant. They are also a non-traditional student. When asked what the most difficult challenge they had to overcome at Pacific was, they said that overcoming the differences between attending a four-year institution like Pacific and community college, where they started their path in higher education, was hard. Youyou also had to face more personal challenges. They were asked questions about their choice of major, saying that “studying Psychology appeared to be in direct conflict with my culture and how I was raised. It started by asking, ‘Why would you study this when other more clearly lucrative programs are within your reach? You could participate in a pre-professional program or be in a far more lucrative major, so why do you pay so much to study psychology?’”  

As they grappled with answering those questions, Youyou concluded that they “don't owe someone who doesn't put forth the effort to understand me an explanation about what my interests are, but I think it is important to remind myself that psychology is interesting to me, because it is a scientific way to understand peoples' behavior, influences their behavior for the best, and also to understand myself.”  

Given Youyou’s breadth of experience and senior standing, I thought it prudent to ask them what advice they would give to a new student. They responded that new Pacific students should “always stay in touch with your faculty and talk to them if you ever have questions about anything they talk about, even if it is not directly related to their course material, definitely reach out! I've gotten most of my opportunities here at Pacific through faculty who I had talked to frequently about their and my interests, regardless of whether they were faculty in my major!”  

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