Sage Wyatt, Yihe Li and Scott MacEachern all started university young. Li was 15 when he joined Duke Kunshan as a freshman in the fall, the same age professor MacEachern, vice chancellor for academic affairs, was when he entered college in Canada. Sage Wyatt enrolled as a first-year graduate student in the global health program at age 17.
All three hit the fast-forward button at school, which propelled them beyond their peers and brought both exciting opportunities and daunting challenges. Here are their unique stories.
Yihe Li joined Duke Kunshan as a 15-year-old freshman
Pushing through the boundary
Freshman Yihe Li found life at elementary school too slow. ‘The exams were easy,’ he says. ‘Everyone scored 95-plus out of 100, with many tied in first place. I wanted to see what the brainiest students were like.’
To speed things up, Li applied to join the prodigy program at Beijing No. 8 High School, which would allow him to squeeze eight years of study into just four. He was one of 30 students selected from more than 3,000 candidates, all aged around 10.
He ranked around 10th in the class ‘ which included the school’s top three students as well as members of China’s Mathematics Olympiad national team ‘ and he took part in various competitions, including winning first prize in a Beijing computer science contest.
For years, Li raced forward while many peers strolled, his schedule packed with schoolwork and competitions. Academic success had demarcated his boundary, and he denied entry to everything ‘irrelevant.’
It was an attitude he initially carried into life at Duke Kunshan, where at age 15 he enrolled in fall 2019 as part of the undergraduate Class of 2023 after turning down offers from Hong Kong University, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and other leading institutions.
His early posts on social media related mostly to schoolwork: the fierce competition to register for popular courses, demanding professors, or staying up until dawn replying to emails. It was everyday life within a self-imposed boundary. Yet after a few months immersed in the culture at Duke Kunshan, where students are encouraged to escape their comfort zone, Li began to make some important decisions.
Despite being confident he would do well on a natural science course, Li’s class schedule for the spring semester included a surprise choice ‘ Media Arts. ‘I used my precious priority registration to choose a course I may not like,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing.’
He says he has also stopped seeing classmates as rivals. When other students reach out to him with math questions, he shares what he knows without reservation. He also feels comfortable approaching others when he has questions on English writing. He really enjoys these exchanges, he says.
Li is still moving quickly, but now he is crossing his boundary and trying something different.
Sage Wyatt started college at 13 and is now enrolled in Duke Kunshan’s global health master’s program
‘Invisible’ girl grows in confidence
American student Sage Wyatt says she has lived with the word ‘outsider’ for as long as she can remember.
As her parents and grandparents are a mixture of European, African and Asian heritage, she has had difficulty finding the community to which she feels she belongs. ‘Even before my parents got married, one of their friends said they shouldn’t have children, because the kid would live a lonely life, as he or she would struggle to find their identity or a community,’ she says.
In addition, because she was homeschooled, Wyatt had few friends her own age.
Her parents, both trained therapists, taught her to read and do simple math while she was in kindergarten. By the time Wyatt started elementary school, she was already four years ahead of her peers, according to assessments. The school said it could not be responsible for her because she was too advanced.
With no other option available, Wyatt’s parents began to homeschool her at age 6. This remained the case until her 13th birthday, when she received an offer letter from Mary Baldwin University, a liberal arts college in Virginia, U.S., to join its program for the exceptionally gifted.
Four years later, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology, Wyatt began studying for a master’s in global health at Duke Kunshan.
At Mary Baldwin, she initially tried to go unnoticed. ‘I always wore something plain, something that didn’t stand out too much. That way, people would think I was normal,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have much style, color or shine like a lot of other young girls.’
Vanishing into the background was her armor, but she soon realized that being ‘invisible’ would not solve the underlying problem. People still whispered about her being too young, that she didn’t belong, that she couldn’t be trusted.
Eventually, Wyatt decided to do something she was passionate about, no matter what people might say. She joined the student government and became a coordinator for international students. She learned to organize activities and help others with their problems with study and life.
Several international students came to her once to complain that strange man was stalking them. ‘He was inviting them to his house, following them and saying he knew them, which is scary, especially in a strange country,’ she says. Wyatt offered emotional support to the students and alerted the school, which called the police. The stalking quickly stopped.
Over time, Wyatt won the respect of her peers and convinced them she’s not so different after all.
Today, Wyatt, who is in the global health graduate program, appreciates the small victories, an attitude she attributes to a sick cat adopted by her parents while her family lived in New York City. ‘She had tons of health problems, and the other cats were mean to her. But every day, whenever you opened a can of cat food, she would look so happy,’ Wyatt recalls. ‘I think she expected to starve every day, or get beaten up by another cat, so every little joy was great to her.’
Wyatt has found a new suit of armor: The confidence to enjoy life.
Exploring the past to understand the present
Scott MacEachern moved fast as young student, but it took him time to find direction. Growing up on a traditional farm on Prince Edward Island, eastern Canada, he attended a small elementary school where a single teacher taught all eight grades. He raced through all eight grades in just five years and began high school at age 11.
Scott MacEachern (right), Duke Kunshan’s vice chancellor of academic affairs, began visiting Africa to carry out archaeological research in his early 20s
‘Every time I finished the textbooks for one grade, my teacher just started me on the next,’ says MacEachern, professor of archaeology and Duke Kunshan’s vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The nearest high school was a 90-minute drive away and had about 1,000 students. It was violent and chaotic, and bullying was commonplace, he says. ‘So being able to enter university at 15 years old was nice, because everyone was polite and serious.’
Yet being the first member of his family to attend college, MacEachern quickly began to feel lost. He started as an engineering major at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), but after two years, he knew it wasn’t the career for him. He dropped out and joined the army, but that wasn’t a good fit either, and before long, he was re-enrolled at UPEI.
This time, to try something new, MacEachern took a course in archaeology ‘ and everything changed.
‘What’s important about archaeology is not the individual things we find, but how we put knowledge together into a view of past lives, how people lived in the past,’ he says. ‘It’s a complicated thing to do, because you’re always building a puzzle where about three-quarters of the pieces are missing. It’s the puzzle-solving I like.’
After graduation, despite having only one year of training in the field, MacEachern secured a place in the University of Calgary’s graduate program for archaeology. There, he met his mentor, archaeologist and professor Nicholas David.
‘He’s in his mid-80s now. This year, he asked me to take care of all of his books and writings after he’s gone. I was so touched,’ MacEachern says, adding with a smile, ‘This is a guy who in 1980 told me I didn’t know anything about archaeology ‘ and I’ve been working with him continuously ever since.’
MacEachern first traveled to Africa to do archaeology when he was 21. Two years later, he begin his studies into the prehistory of the Lake Chad Basin. It was another important milestone. In the past 36 years, he has made over 20 field trips to the region, spending a total of about seven years there.
‘People there have pretty hard lives, but they’re very nice, very sharp. When I was going to Africa for the first time, I was young and arrogant. I thought it was exotic, and maybe savage. But gradually over time, I grew to respect people,’ he says.
In 2018, MacEachern published his book ‘Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa,’ which sheds light on the historical origins of the Islamic terror group Boko Haram, which is based in Nigeria.
‘It is often assumed to be a modern terrorist organization without any history. But I argue in the book that it actually has a deep history in the area,’ he says. ‘Many of these terrorists used to be bandits and smugglers.’
He recalls encountering these bandits in the 1990s before they turned to terrorism. ‘They’re looking for money mostly. They kidnap people for ransom. They’d post notices in towns, saying if you’re in a certain area, make sure you’re carrying this amount of cash with you, otherwise we will kidnap you. Recently, to avoid putting ourselves in danger with Boko Haram, we moved about 200 kilometers to the south to do archaeology.’
MacEachern, who spent 23 years teaching at Bowdoin College before joining Duke Kunshan in 2018, is now a leading figure in the efforts to combine archaeological and genetic analysis to discover the secrets of human history in Africa. He is also active in cultural heritage management, having worked with an oil company to protect archaeological sites from the impact of a 1,100-km pipeline project in Central Africa, and is an adviser to the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge program.
Reflecting on his early years, the bullying at high school and the sense of isolation at university, MacEachern feels these experiences helped instill in him the importance of empathy.
‘Although we may be culturally different, you have to recognize the humanity in other people,’ he says.
