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My fondest memories of youth consisted of playing with friends in open space with plants that could feed our imagination as well as our stomachs. As I grew up, the place grew up as well and new residential developments, commercial centers and parking lots paved over many of the gardens and blurred my memories of them. From high school, I became interested in photography and art, which compelled me especially observant toward the relationship between human beings and the environment. I have come to realize that the environment we live in has suffered much damage from pollution and lacks competent planning which lead my memorial childhood place went away. How to create an environment suitable for human living when resources are limited is a question always in my mind. I began to think that I could make use of my artistic gift, concern about, and interest in the landscape by entering the field of landscape design and putting my effort into beautifying our surroundings. Therefore, after graduating from high school, I entered the Department of Urban planning (orientation of Landscape architecture) at Beijing Forestry University, which has the best LA school in China.

Since then, the nearly four years’ subject study has both well prepared me and strongly drive me in pursuing higher academic training in Landscape Architecture. I found LA is the ideal profession for me because it combines my affinity for nature and the environment with my creative and artistic ambitions. I believe this subject requires a synthesis of understanding so I read many books during college time, including areas of landscape architecture, architecture, urban studies, sociology, ecology, behavior psychology, philosophy and so forth. The combination of these disciplines helps me truly understand the spaces I am creating. At the same time, I found myself a profound interesting in space and scale. Also, I noticed that Chinese classical philosophy Taoism is a way of life inspired from the rhythms of the natural world; this is a crucial factor when people design space and create balance between the natural world and the human world so that I wrote some papers on the connection of modern landscape design and Chinese classical philosophy. In addition, I served as chairman of Ping-Pong association during the third year, responsible for planning our association exhibitions and interscholastic competitions. This experience increased my teamwork abilities and efficiency in problem solving, which will be of great help in my future pursuits.

The value of landscape education is not only in its accumulation of knowledge, but also in its methods for solving real-life problems. I believe that one must learn more than plain theory, and so during my senior year, I took part in internships in landscape design. I was involved in planning, design, and implementation of landscaping projects, combining theory with practice. Through this work experience, I became familiar with the entire process of a design process. Worth mentioning is that this experience greatly influenced me and attracted my interest, because I recognized a good designer should establish an environment based on the opinions of the users in the area instead of on the whims of the designer. However, the concept of user’s participation in landscape design is only in its initial stages in China, I believe that people will have more suitable place if there are more participation of user’s. Therefore, after completing my studies and returning to China, I plan to carry out my ideas by applying my knowledge to user's participation projects.

My internship experience plus my travel experience throughout china’s vast territory have helped me to trace modern china’s culture to its different sources, and the variety not only deeply impressed me but also fired my imagination so that I can now readily appreciate a society’s cultural, historical and socio-political impact on its landscape design, I now try to reflect my own cultural and social background in my own designs. At the same time, I understand that the rapid growth of China’s major cities has produced a variety of landscape problems caused by poor original design, haphazard maintenance practices, trees and shrubs that are too big for their spaces, irrigation and drainage problems, and a generally tired look. I believe that the diverse and systematic training of your graduate program will attach strong landscape design skills to me so that I will be able to help solve these problems and update the look and feel of common area landscapes. Thus, there is no doubt for me to choose your sincere university with the world wide famous reputation for the high education quality in your Landscape architecture program. As the program focuses on practical skills for real-world learning and puts a strong emphasis on developing continual understanding skills in related fields, it is the program I pursue indeed.