Philosophy Orientation Camp
I coordinated the committee and served as the liaison between the organising team, the department and the participants. Roughly forty incoming students spent four days learning what studying philosophy at CUHK actually involves.
I designed three of the camp’s activities as philosophy exercises rather than icebreakers. In one, groups draft the principles they want their community to live by, then re-examine those principles from the position of each different member, and revise until everyone in the group can endorse the result. Students who had never read philosophy spent an evening arguing about what fairness requires when the people bound by a rule are not equally placed under it.
I also edited the camp’s 24-page publication and served as emotional counselling officer, which meant being the person a homesick or overwhelmed first-year could talk to at two in the morning.
Mentoring
I am training a first-year editor to take over CU Philosophy Review when I graduate, and I read and comment on drafts for the students who write for it. Learning to write philosophy is mostly learning to be edited well, and I try to give the kind of comments I was given.
Service learning at Chi Lin Nunnery
Six sessions at Chi Lin Nunnery, working alongside the people who keep its traditions running. I studied ceramics with the ceramicist Gao Feng, helped restore silk strings for the guqin, worked on the bonsai collection, and took part in the Spring Memorial ceremony.
The experience became an argument I still use. A tradition is not transmitted by texts alone. It needs makers who can still perform the craft, and it needs a public able to recognise when the craft is done well. Lose either and the texts remain while the practice does not.