Visiting China Scholars’ U.S. Takeaways: Advancing Research, Healthcare in China

by Rebecca Endres ’15

Thanks to grants from the Chinese government, two visiting scholars from the Hunan Province in south-central China, Jia Liu and Jie Pan have had the opportunity to visit Adelphi University and observe College of Nursing and Public Health classes and lectures.

Pan, a student at Foshan University, left Adelphi at the end of April 2015, concluding her six-month stay in the United States, while Liu, a head nurse and doctoral candidate at Central South University, will stay until March 2016.

Both students said that the more collaborative educational approach in the United States gave them the opportunity to offer opinions and connect with nursing faculty at Adelphi. They said they are now prepared to take the next steps in their education, which they say will involve continuing to do research in their respective fields and exploring ways to improve healthcare in China.

“In China, I work in the organ transplant center and the intensive care unit, so organ donation and transplantation patients are my interest,” she said. “So I will also go to Queens Hospital to observe more about clinical nursing.”

Both visiting scholars noticed differences between Chinese and American students in the classroom. “At Adelphi, students communicate and discuss things more with their professor in class,” Liu explained.

“Education levels are very different here and in China,” Yiyuan Sun, D.N.Sc., Pan’s sponsor, said. “We don’t have many Ph.D.-prepared nursing faculty there.” She explained that because doctoral programs in nursing are a fairly recent phenomenon in China, few educators have attained that level of training.

Pan is thinking about enrolling in a doctoral program—and looking into the qualifications and criteria to get accepted in Adelphi’s program due to the positive experience she has had here. “She found that teaching here is more focused on application and how you’re going to use that in a real clinical setting,” her sponsor, Dr. Sun, explained. “But in China, it’s more didactic and very theoretical.”

When not sitting in on labs and lectures, Pan sought to improve her English so she can publish her research. She had done several studies, including one on how older adults in China self-manage diabetes symptoms and maintain proper diet and exercise. Pan is hopeful that she can get this work published in China as well as the United States.

Jia Liu is studying here—alongside her sponsor and sister, Shan Liu, Ph.D.—and will return to China to complete her doctoral dissertation.

Because her sister teaches at Adelphi, she made the decision to come here to improve her command of English, observe doctoral classes and advance her knowledge of qualitative research.

“I’m very interested in qualitative research, and I know my adviser, Dr. [Jane] White, is well-known in that area,” she said. The high number of faculty specializing in qualitative research was one of the biggest draws for Jia Liu. She added that somewhere down the line she would like to have a team of qualitative researchers in China; many medical studies there currently concentrate on quantitative analysis.

Pan added that she’s very thankful to all of the faculty members she met in her brief time at Adelphi. “They are very friendly and tried to accommodate her requests,” Dr. Sun said.

It was not until Pan came to the United States and saw how vast the difference between a master’s degree and a doctorate could be that she decided to enroll in a doctoral program.

The focus on application and discussion has helped both visiting scholars prepare for the next steps in their education as they look ahead to continue research in their respective fields and explore ways to improve healthcare in China.

In contrast, a visiting China scholar in 2012 focused on lecturing about Eastern medicine, including acupuncture and herb therapy. XiaoYing Tian, Ph.D., an assistant professor from Jinan University, made separate presentations to Adelphi faculty and to students at the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels.