Gordon Li ’14

“Originally I’m from Hong Kong. At age 11, I was sent to boarding school in England, where I experienced a shock in both culture and perspective. For those years, I wouldn’t say I had a lot of close friends at school, let alone family.

I decided to go to Wittenberg because my grandfather went there, and I wanted to see where he came from – that part of his journey. My grandfather was kind of a big deal, which I did not know until maybe two years earlier. I was thinking, here’s this man in my family that I admire. How do I fill his shoes? Would I like to go down the same path? I decided not to study business the same way he did but to see what called to me. Essentially that’s the purpose of a liberal arts education, anyway – to find your path.

I would say I found what I was looking for at Wittenberg, but it did not have much to do with my grandfather. I found open-minded people. I got into a fraternity and made very close friends right off the bat. I studied marine invertebrates and went on the Bahamas trip with the husband-and-wife team of Jim Welch and Kathleen Reinsel. (We called her ‘K.R.,’ although coming from England, it took me a while to address a professor so informally.) I’ve known a lot of people who have gone to Wittenberg. Not once have I heard that they didn’t find what they were looking for. I was looking for family.”