Alex Wang: beyond the scholar
More than four years ago, Alex Wang joined NYU Abu Dhabi’s first class of incoming freshmen. Fast forward to Fall 2013: the NYU Abu Dhabi senior, ...
Dec 7, 2013
More than four years ago, Alex Wang joined NYU Abu Dhabi’s first class of incoming freshmen. Fast forward to Fall 2013: the NYU Abu Dhabi senior, majoring in Social Research and Public Policy with a multidisciplinary concentration in Urbanization, is now a semester away from graduation. In the past year, he has been named a Truman and Rhodes Scholar, a first for NYUAD on both counts.
The achievements were preceded by hard work, many plane rides, changed perspectives and a supportive community. Throughout the long journey, one thing has remained the same: Wang's interest in movement and migration. This curiosity was awakened during his childhood, growing up in the United States with Taiwanese parents and living between the two countries. His four years in Abu Dhabi have only strengthened his interest.
“During my first year,” said Wang, “I spent a huge amount of time just wandering around the city … All I wanted to do was find every crevice of interesting stuff in the place.”
Wang’s time at NYUAD has helped him develop what he defines as “an ethical way to travel.” Wang sees traveling as an opportunity to push his boundaries and escape his comfort zone, and he strives for what he calls “careful intellectual engagement” with a location before going there.
Prior to landing in the UAE, he spent time reading articles in The National and reports on the country. He appreciates NYUAD courses that have brought him to places such as Mumbai and Sri Lanka, particularly because these classes provided a structured preparation for the destinations. Yet he has also enjoyed recent independent travels, like one with friends to Lebanon.
[blockquote_image image="https://cdn.thegazelle.org/gazelle/2013/09/Beirut_wiki-commons.jpg"]“‘Anytime I get in a taxi or anytime I’m waiting somewhere, I always start conversations with the people that are around me,' said Wang.”[/blockquote_image]
There he spoke with a bus driver, a Syrian immigrant, for the entirety of a three-hour ride. Wang asked him about his experience leaving his country and working in Lebanon. This is another important element to Wang’s method of traveling: Wang likes conversations.
“Anytime I get in a taxi or anytime I’m waiting somewhere, I always start conversations with the people that are around me,” said Wang, who believes this approach helps him understand the perspectives woven into the fabric of a city.
His insatiable questions have also led him to actively participate in his surroundings. In his freshman year, for example, he founded ADvocacy, NYUAD’s volunteerism Student Interest Group that works with migrant laborers in the community. The SIG is currently teaching ESL classes to migrants in Abu Dhabi.
Creating dialogue with people has also shaped Wang’s personal philosophy: using empathy as a way to connect to the outside world.
“Empathy is this weird X-factor that you can’t really capture in a quantitative or qualitative study,” he said. For this reason, he explained, he likes ethnography, which enables him to apply empathy as a research method. During his time in Abu Dhabi, he has done substantial fieldwork with the city’s migrant workers, an experience that informed and became the topic of his capstone. He wants to explore the subject further in the coming years and still struggles with certain aspects of the experiences he observes.
“If your reason for coming to Abu Dhabi is to deliver an institute talk or if it’s to find meaningful work to provide for your family, it’s not entirely clear to me why that’s so different,” said Wang. “Or how that experience of migration doesn’t create some kind of shared experience between these different parties.”
[blockquote_image image="https://cdn.thegazelle.org/gazelle/2013/09/Oxford_wiki-commons.JPG.jpg"]“‘My dream,' said Wang, ‘is that I will, at some point in my life, be an academic who is also embedded in public life in a meaningful way.'”[/blockquote_image]
To learn more about migration, Wang is committed to revolving between fields in and outside of academia. He believes in collaboration, but also is consciously making an effort to learn about different lenses of research, from sociology to economics to policy. Going forward, however, his goal is to bring together the often separate worlds of academia and policy making.
“My dream,” said Wang, “is that I will, at some point in my life, be an academic who is also embedded in public life in a meaningful way.”
Headed soon to Oxford, Wang imparts a piece of wisdom that has helped him over the years find what he explained as the “local meaning” of the place.
“At least once a week, you need to come out of Sama Tower, pick a direction you haven’t walked in and just go … It needs to be a sustained engagement with the city, and there needs to not be some end,” said Wang. “It needs to be directionless, in a certain sense.”
Costanza Maio is a staff writer and TGTV host. Email her at editorial@thegazelle.org.
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