Yingquan Song, Ph.D. Student Policy, Organization, Measurement, and Evaluation Major: B.S., Mathematics and B.A., Education , Tianjin University / M.A., Engineering, Tianjin University Career Plans: Teaching and research in social policy analysis and educational evaluation Home: Pan Zhihua, Sichuan, China

"Berkeley is a world-class university, but it is also a place that allows you to slow down for awhile and to think about what is really important to you."

My background:
Before coming to Berkeley, I worked at Peking University, where I served as director of the Office of Educational Evaluation and Teaching Assessment. I was also heavily involved in several educational reform programs there, including the Honors Science Program(HSP) and the Chinese Undergraduate Research Endowment (CURE), which is a fund aimed at helping promising Chinese undergraduates start their initial research in their early undergraduate years through working with professors from various fields. It was sponsored by Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, who is now a professor at Columbia University in New York. My experiences there have helped me to think more deeply about policy options and educational reform efforts--how to put them into practice effectively and also how to make these beautiful educational idea become fruitful in reality.

My academic program:
POME is a fantastic program. I greatly appreciate the effort faculty make to combine disciplines in our study, including public policy, sociology, history, economics, measurement and evaluation, and statistics. I also appreciate our biweekly POME seminar, through which I've gotten to know all the first-year students; they seem passionate about education and the social welfare of all people. I've experienced how education happens in intimate interaction between faculty and students.

My current work:
I am involved with a project that is analyzing the cost-effectiveness of technology in teaching and learning in higher education. With the wide use of information technology(IT), particularly the Internet, people begin to ask: is it cost-effective? What we are doing is looking for hard evidence to see if the use of IT in instruction is efficient in traditional universities. This is a project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. I work as a Graduate Student Research assistant for my academic advisor, Prof. David Stern.

My advice to prospective students:
You are never too old to be a graduate student, even if you're over 30. The students here have a passion for education that is much like a newborn's passion for life, no matter how old they are or how young they are.

 

 

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