It is a rare gift to have the opportunity to introduce high school students from halfway around the world to the wonders of academic libraries in the United States, but is absolutely magical when that introduction takes place in ZSR Library, and you’re able to take a fresh look at ZSR through the eyes of these delightful students. For the past two weeks, the RAISE Center has been hosting 30 Chinese high school students from DongGuan, China. These students take all of their classes in English, and they are preparing to attend college either in the United States or Western Europe. After spending two weeks at Wake Forest, these students will visit Duke University, and then they will visit universities in New York City and Los Angeles.

On the first day of their visit to WFU, Hu Womack and Joy Gambill had the privilege of giving these students a tour of our beloved ZSR Library. Both of us immediately felt the positive energy among the group, and we decided on the fly to split the group into two groups. Hu’s group started on the sixth floor and worked their way down, while Joy’s group started in the Atrium and worked their way up. Have you ever realized how glorious the view of the atrium is from the sixth floor? If you’ve not admired the view in a while, we suggest you reacquaint yourself! ZSR is a beautiful place to study and offers a wonderful variety of study locations!

On the second day, Hu and Joy offered a one-shot library instruction session in Room 204 that provided the students with research help for the Developmental Psychology course they are taking while they are here. In addition to introducing them to databases in general and APA PsycINFO specifically, we also introduced the students to a couple of specific developmental psychology journals that the students could browse in order to select empirical articles to summarize and evaluate for their course. There is no way to express to you how fun this experience was for us! It was pure delight to watch their faces light up. They were immediately able to grasp and appreciate the treasures that academic libraries offer.

We wrapped up this amazing experience with a Game “Night” in the ZSR Mandelbaum room on Monday, June 26th, from 3-5 pm! We had some wonderful volunteers from across ZSR pitch in and help. Shoutout to Claire Nyles Suer, Kyle Denlinger, and Peter Romanov, who generously gave their time and joined Hu and Joy, leading a variety of games for this joyfully raucous event! Joy led ten students in a game of ‘Spoons” (and if you have never seen Joy teach a group of students how to play this game, then you have missed out!) These students genuinely enjoyed the opportunity to meet people from across ZSR, and we enjoyed introducing them to an academic library as a place for fun and community building! You can check out some pics and a video on the ZSR Flickr site! One final shoutout to Mikeala Cook, who was overseeing the program for the RAISE center! She made this such a fun and easy partnership for ZSR! We hope to see the program return next summer!