MA in Anthropology, CUHK, 2012.
Home town: Hong Kong
Email: yixuening21″at”msn.com

It is my good fortune to have come across the discipline of Anthropology in the course of my education. As someone with an innate sense of curiosity, it was difficult to settle on a particular subject for my graduate studies. I recall going through the list of courses when applying to a master’s program. As Anthropology was first in the alphabetical order, I happened to parse through the program’s introduction and was quickly drawn to it. Subsequently, I began reading books written by department professors, starting with Gordon Mathews’ What Makes Life Worth Living. Professor Mathews’ book challenged the way I thought about the world and inspired me to delve into a wider range of books on Anthropology, thus furthering my interest in the subject. The Master of Arts in Anthropology program in CUHK taught me volumes about the field, including anthropological theories, what anthropologists study and think, and active areas of research while concurrently birthing the passion of research in me. It demonstrated how a seemingly trivial problem in society could have multiple approaches of questioning and formulation of respective answers. I like learning about people and cultures to have a better understanding of the world, and to that end, I have used ethnographic approaches to research various projects. As serendipity would have it, the more I focused on learning about “the other” through the lens of Anthropology, the more I have come to understand myself while earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the process.