Every December as the final days of their first semester at NYU Shanghai wind down, first-year students can be seen busily working in teams and setting up elaborate projects in the ninth floor colloquium rooms. It’s all in preparation for the annual Celebration of GPS, the culmination of a semester reading canonical texts from China, Europe, and beyond in Global Perspectives on Society, a course taken by all first-year students.
Students are grouped together in teams and tasked with synthesizing the readings and discussions they’ve been having into a final exhibit which grapples with questions raised in class: where do we come from, how do we live with others, how do we live with ourselves, and where are we heading?
This year, 250 teams exhibited their projects in the celebration, which was open to the entire community on the last day of classes. The vibe was energetic as student presenters engaged visitors in conversation about their projects and shared their understanding of the GPS texts they’d read. The exhibits were an eclectic mix, using free samples of coffee and fried chicken, handmade zines, board games, videos, fortune telling, and popular movies to explain what they learned in class.
Senior Lecturer for English for Academic Purposes Marcel Daniels said it’s one of his favorite annual events to attend. “For me, it's always been about seeing the amount of pride students have in sharing their work to anyone within eye contact or the sound of their voice,” he said. “It's so remarkable that these students are 14 weeks into their undergraduate career and have developed the abilities to research their topics, work collectively, and speak in detail about the process and results.”
GPS Postdoc Fellow Warren Stanislaus, whose students won the GPS Excellence Award this year (for the third year in a row), said it is gratifying to see his students successfully apply the big ideas from the GPS texts to the real world around them.
“I learn about the global or local issues that interest them and the meaningful connections they make between Frankenstein and the K-pop idol industry or Fiddler on the Roof and Shanghai’s marriage market,” he said. “What makes the final project uniquely challenging and vibrant is that the students not only have to do great work, but must also communicate that great work in a clear and compelling way at the final exhibition.”
One of the standout exhibits featured a table covered in sheep's wool and a single question: “Are you a sheep?” First-year students Margad Amarbayasgalan from Mongolia, Feng Runfei and He Bangyuan from China, and Antonio Joseph III from the US regaled visitors with the story of their adventure standing in line for a trendy cup of coffee in Shanghai. They connected their experiences and observations to readings by Foucault, Freud and others, explaining to visitors how those thinkers see group decisions. “We wanted to make a cumulative thought on GPS of itself,” explained Antonio, who goes by AJ. “This is GPS.”
Another one of the winning projects featured a handmade zine that asked the question, “Are we becoming machines?” Featuring images and quotes from Frankenstein, Black Mirror, and Marx and Engels, the zine allowed the group to experience making something with their hands and think deeply about whether technology determines history.
“I think we are talking about humans and machines,” explained first-year student Cynthia Su Leyang, who created the zine together with her group. “I really enjoyed putting images and words [and] doing the layout.”
Clinical Assistant Professor of History and GPS Program Head Erica Mukherjee described the event as “one of the best parts of the semester.” As opposed to the lectures throughout the year, “now, they all get to come together and share their own voices,” she said. “And so it's a little loud, but that's because we have a lot of voices with a lot of insightful ideas to share.”
The experience of working together on their projects was intense, students say, as they tried to coordinate schedules and work collaboratively. Margad Amarbayasgalan said when she and her classmates were grouped together, they barely knew each other. “They were just my teammates,” she recalled. But when they went off campus to stand in line for coffee, something changed. “I felt very connected with these people," she said. "I think I have new friends.”
Students said talking with classmates from diverse backgrounds helped uncover new meanings as they worked together on their projects. First-year student Lexie Hopper from the US worked on a project with her group mates Li Chengliang from China and Lina Yang, Summer Feng, and Tiffany Cheng from the US about how freedom in education is interpreted by different cultures. She said interviewing NYU Shanghai’s international student body helped them find deeper meanings and connections with the texts.
“It definitely put the “global perspectives” in Global Perspectives on Society,” she said with a laugh. “We come from all these different cultures, but in a higher education setting, we make our own culture. Learning about and seeing everybody's viewpoints reestablished to me that we're all from all these different places, and we were able to create this symbiotic environment where we can all be able to grow and learn from each other. Especially at a school that's as diverse as ours, I think GPS provided this environment where we could bring all of these cultures together.”
2025 GPS Excellence Award Winners
Why We Queue? Fieldwork@Viral Shanghai Coffee Shop
Margad Amarbayasgalan '29
Feng Runfei '29
He Bangyuan '29
Antonio Joseph III '29
Board Game of Life
Ana Albarracin '29
Mia Djambas '29
Jacob Jui '29
Ren Qingrui '29
Enerel Sandagdorj '29
Sydney Yuen '29
Are We Becoming Machines?
Anar Chinbat '29
Clover Signore '29
Cynthia Su Leyang '29
Wendy Zheng '29
GPS Popular Favorite Award
The Rise of Global Conservativism
Audrey Janae Dalton '29
Feng Xiaoneng '29
Sanzhar Iden '29
Delali Tetteh '29
Wang Aoran '29