Julia Marsala (Artsci’14) is from a small farm town in Pennsylvania, so when she stepped into the megalopolis of Shanghai, with its more than 23 million people, she felt a little overstimulated, a little overwhelmed.
“The sheer number of people on the streets – it was nothing I’d ever seen. It was culture shock, but not in a bad way,” she says. “The city and China in general forces you out of your comfort zone, and when you do that, you learn a lot about yourself.”