Do not deny unique students
National Tsinghua University has announced the names of the students accepted to its “extraordinary students” program. Competition is intense, as only 60 of more than 1,000 applicants were accepted.
Those accepted include a socially awkward mathematical genius, and an autodidact with a strong interest in history who wrote seven books in two years. Also, a model still in senior-high school who gave up the catwalk to serve Taiwan’s remote areas was accepted into to the school’s BA program.
This is a great program that allows many outstanding young people to enter university thanks to their own unique talents. Going through the standard entrance exam, these students would never have been able to study at a prestigious university. With outstanding mathematical and writing talent, they may not perform as well in other subjects, in which case they would have fallen behind in an entrance exam.
A few years ago, Shen Hsin-ling (沈芯菱), known for her enthusiasm for social services, was accepted to the school’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences through the Ministry of Education’s Twinkling Star program. After graduation, she went on to the National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Graduate Institute of Journalism, and she is now an innovation and technology doctoral candidate at NTU and a student in Harvard’s executive MBA program.
The Chinese-language magazine Business Weekly has called her a potential winner of the “Taiwanese version of the Nobel Peace Prize” and Time for Students magazine has referred to her as an “angel.” Would she have been able to go to NTU and Harvard without the Twinkling Star program?
By the same token, if it had not been for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich having a similar program, Albert Einstein may never have created the theory of relativity. He was a talented mathematics and physics student, but he was not particularly talented in other subjects. The US and Israel have similar programs in place to promote outstanding talent.
The examples of Einstein and Shen tell us that schools should offer a variety of ways to enroll talented students to make sure that outstanding talent is not left behind. Schools cannot bury true talent in the name of superficial fairness.
Teng Hung-yuan
New Taipei City
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