照片由Richard Howard

当Sarah Nzau'18等待在肯尼亚的机场等待时，开始她的Wellesley旅程，她挥手去了她的家人，他们被聚集在玻璃屏障的另一边。作为她家的第一个离开这个国家，她很紧张，但大多兴奋。很多小时后，当她到达校园时，它终于打了她。“'你没有把它们留在玻璃后面。你离开了他们another continent.’所以，当我开始困惑时，我想，'我做了什么？“”

Looking back on that first day on campus, if Nzau could go back and talk to herself, “I would tell myself, ‘It’s going to be hard, but then, you are going to be more resilient than you realize.’ … I didn’t know how much I could bend and not break, how much I could stretch and just spring back to the same, or even a better, stronger version of me.”

南祖是在Wellesley学习的18个万事达卡基金会学者之一。选择全额奖学金的妇女是来自非洲的学生，这些学生都面临着获得教育的重要经济障碍，致力于在毕业后送回社区。当维多利亚乔治的乔治'05曾经在入院办公室工作，访问了肯尼亚，南祖先生首先了解了Wellesley。“当她说话的全部时间，我想，好的，这似乎是一个可以去的地方，”她记得。

Nzau’s first semester on campus was a challenging one. She had to learn a new educational system, a new version of English, and many skills that most students arriving at Wellesley already know, like how to include citations in an academic paper. But she also found sources of support. After she handed in that first paper without citations, her professor told her about the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center (PLTC), which offers students services ranging from peer tutoring to study skills instruction. “Ever since then, I’ve been a PLTC fan. I go in there even when I feel like my papers are OK,” she says.

Wellesley’s supportive professors also made a huge difference for Nzau that first year. She would go to economics professor Ann Velenchik’s office hours to talk about an assignment, and “She would say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, here are the answers to your questions, but how are you doing?’”

当南祖到达Wellesley时，她计划在她母亲的建议中预先提出。但在她第一个学期进行生物学课程后，她很快就会意识到这不是她的道路。她的第二学期，她接受了Econ 101.“一切都是有道理的，”她说。“这么多世界以及如何通过经济镜头了解它是有道理的。”她成为经济学专业，并在伦敦经济学院度过了她的初级年，这是另一个调整。“在LSE，你自己自己。我们没有教科书。她说，我们不得不学习世界，而且世界上通过论文和文章，“她说。”

今年一月,Nzau Albrig研究员ht Institute. “It gave me a fresh outlook on why I chose economics, and why economics can be used to solve all the problems that we talked about during the institute,” she says. Her group studied democratic resilience, and she explored how politics and economics interact with each other to influence whether countries can manage conflicts in peaceful ways. “It taught me not to be afraid to combine my interests, which are policy and economics; that both of them can be done together to shape a better world, actually,” Nzau says.

毕业后，南祖将在国际社会和公共政策中回到硕士学位。但她肯定有一天，她会回到肯尼亚的家。“最终，我认为自己在肯尼亚的挑战中，我认为自己在肯尼亚是更有帮助的，因为[该国有]和需要的专业知识，”南武说。当她回家后，她将在她第一次对她的家人说再见的那一天之前旅行得比甚至留下。