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Qing Wei Sun spoke very little English when arriving as a Mississippi College student in January 2016.
Nearly a year later, the tall native of China polished his English speaking and writing skills. He’s proven to be an effective communicator on and off the Clinton campus. Qing Wei graduated from MC’s Intensive English Program in December. He will continue his studies as a full-time student at the 190-year-old university in January.
MC’s dedicated team of instructors teach reading, vocabulary, speaking, listening and writing to students like Qing Wei Sun. Whether they come from China, Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, Turkey, Brazil or other nations around the globe, MC’s international students work hard to learn a new language.
“It truly is a joy to work with such wonderful students from such diverse backgrounds,” says Brittany Brooks, director of IEP studies under Mississippi College’s Office of Global Education. “We aim for our graduates to have the skills necessary to thrive in their new academic studies, the university community and the wider community.”
Qing Wei Sun was 18 when he first set foot in the Magnolia State, thousands of miles away from his home in Baoding City in the Hebei Province. His hometown of ten million people in northeastern China sits 87 miles southwest of the capital of Beijing.
While he encountered struggles to learn English right away, Qing Wei Sun quickly made friends, especially with teammates on MC’s table tennis team. With ten years of experience playing table tennis in China, Qing Wei instantly established himself as one of the team’s best players. The MC squad finished as the No. 2 collegiate team in the USA and Canada last season.
People at Mississippi College and around the nation know the lanky 19-year-old as a tremendous player of the Olympic sport.
But IEP instructors know the MC student-athlete more for his academic strengths.
“Qing Wei Sun is one of our brightest students,” Brooks says. “He has made enormous progress since we first welcomed his smiling face to the IEP Program,” she said. “It has been a privilege to watch him grow into a confident, communicative English speaker. We will miss him next semester, but can’t wait to see what he accomplishes as a full-time academic student.”
MC Table Tennis Coach Cheng Li appreciates the enormous value that Qing Wei Sun brings to the squad and is delighted he’s succeeding in the classroom, too.
“I am just so happy for him,” says Li, 24, a native of China and the team’s former captain. “I hope he can keep working hard with his table tennis and school work, adds the MC senior, a business administration major.
Mississippi College is home to more than 400 international students from over two dozen nations.
Qing Wei Sun doesn’t need to go far to find friends who speak Chinese. He’s among three MC table tennis stars from China. The others are: graduate student Tong Zhang and senior Yichi Zhang. He also enjoys learning about American culture and sharing his insights about his Asian land with teammate Jeremy Gore, 19, a freshman from Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.
While Qing Wei was a newcomer to the MC squad, he suddenly became a key part of the team. Last season, Qing Wei finished 2nd in men’s singles at the national collegiate table tennis championships in Round Rock, Texas in March 2016. The national champ was MC teammate Yichi Zhang.
In the classroom, Qing Wei impressed teachers like Stephanie Wright and Danielle Denny with his high degree of skills in IEP and appetite to soak up knowledge. Qing Wei says he would like to try to learn other languages, perhaps Japanese, in the future. For sure, he admires the new people he’s met in Clinton, Mississippi.
At MC, there have been more than 80 IEP graduates from 2014 through 2016. Students in the program at the 5,133-student Baptist-affiliated university also come from nations like Mexico, Bangladesh, Columbia, Cameroon, Yemen, Vietnam, Taiwan and Qatar. Led by top-notch instructors, the Intensive English Program remains a United Nations of learning at Mississippi College.
