Westlake University undergraduates took on vital roles as teaching assistants (TAs) for the Westlake Pre-college Summer Program, a STEM initiative centered around international collaboration.The program gathered58 high school students from 16 countries,including China, the U.S., and the U.K., for a two-week experience that went beyond academic enrichment to have participants solve actual problems related togene editing, synthetic tissues, robotic fish and nanoscale engineering.
Though barely older than the high school students, the Westlake student TAs became a lifeline for the participants as they navigated the rigorous, hands-on curriculum of the summer program.
This year marked the third time for Shuoyi Hu, a member of Westlake’s inaugural undergraduate class, to volunteer as a TA for the program. She had taken Biology Lab I during her freshman year at Westlake and remembered how starting with gene editing struck her as both ambitious and overwhelming. To prepare to teach the incoming summer students during her first year as a program TA, she watched numerous English-language science explainers, recognizing that knowing how to do an experiment differs from actually introducing it in another language.
After a semester abroad at Duke University, Hu returned this year with more poise and a light-hearted approach, offering both advice and humor as she moved among the benches. She joked with students about labeling their samples, emphasizing the importance of conscientiousness and the risk of mixing up project materials with those of other teams. Over time, as the students' experimental skills grew, so did Hu's self-assurance.
Joshua Cevey, a Westlake undergraduate from Texas who served as Hu’s co-TA during this summer, quickly became a go-to resource in the lab because he had just studied gene editing over the past year as a freshman. He observed that while first-year students in the U.S. seldom have much lab time, Westlake’s emphasis on early research experience had prepared him well to be a TA.
When Cevey noticed repeated confusion around a calculation, he walked the students through the math on a whiteboard to explain each step. Moments of teaching and guiding students, such as this one, instilled in him a renewed sense of purpose, he said. While he once doubted his future as a teacher—especially in comparison to his high-achieving Chinese peers—his summer experience proved that he could excel at and enjoy teaching, reaffirming his aspirations.“I won’t trade that for the whole world,” he said.
Zheng Zhang, another TA, also brought a unique perspective to the Westlake Pre-college Summer Program. Though a biology major, he joined the mechanical engineering group to help students build a robotic fish designed to swim. Zhang approached the project alongside his students, troubleshooting and testing along with them. When an error in the code caused only two of three motors to function, Zheng insisted on probing the reason rather than defaulting to what worked. After consulting with the students and trying multiple approaches—including with the help of DeepSeek—they discovered a conflict between the camera and motor code. A small change in the channel and timer code resolved the issue, providing a valuable real-world lesson in persistence and logic.
As the program concluded in a closing ceremony, cheers eruptedfor the TAs, oftenlouder than those for the students. Yet many high schoolers didn’t realize that their TAs were returning the applause out of gratitude for the experience and personal growth.
Hu learned that teaching is not about having a podium but about seizing the opportunity to step up. Cevey regained confidence in his dream to teach and rediscovered the joys of helping others learn. And Zhang saw firsthand the power of collaborative problem-solving, a principle that Westlake has emphasized from its inception: If you continue to think and work together, you will discover the solution.
