On December 17, 2025, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies (hereafter, “HNC”) hosted a themed workshop for HNC staff. Staff from departments including Faculty, Student Affairs, Housekeeping, Alumni Affairs, Engineering, Finance, Public Relations, etc. all met together for a discussion surrounding their experiences with communication and solving challenging issues as education professionals. The activity was jointly hosted by Sherry Zhang, Coordinator for Gender Violence Prevention, Education, and Response at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Siyue Wu of the Nanjing University Office of Mental Health Services, and HNC Student Affairs Department staff Ariel Chen.

Siyue Wu (left), Sherry Zhang (center), Ariel Chen, (right)

HNC leadership, including Co-Directors Xiaorong Li and Adam Webb, Deputy Co-Director John Urban and Deputy Co-Director of Administration, Zhiping Shen, all attended the workshop. Deputy Co-Directors Urban and Shen opened the meeting with a speech emphasizing the purpose of the workshop in building cross-departmental communication channels. Through knowledge exchange and drawing lessons from each other's experiences, the goal of the conversation was to enhance communication between students and staff, reduce work expenditure while increasing efficacy, and create a higher quality living and learning environment for the students at the center.

Workshop opening segment

This section, led by Ariel Chen, Siyue Wu and Sherry Zhan, began with an ice-breaking activity: Thinking from Another’s View. Taking the student perspective as a starting point, attending staff worked together to explore some of the challenges and needs students might face while living and studying in a cross-cultural environment. From this basis, participants then reviewed and examined HNC MAIS and Certificate student body composition, major design, and curriculum planning.

In the section on “sharing difficulties”, staff from each department spoke openly and sincerely about actual communication struggles they had run into with students. The dialogue opened deliberation on challenges related to cross-cultural and cross-generational communication differences, effectiveness in meeting student requests, and other topics, which could be boiled down to a concrete problem-solving aim: “Match needs with precision, and simplify communication processes”. In the open discussion section, each department put their heads together again to determine ways of normalizing cooperation mechanisms following the workshop.

Staff from each department engaging in discussion

This workshop established a strong foundation for optimizing student affairs workflows and improving the quality of service provided by HNC staff. The HNC will use this activity as an opportunity to continue strengthening cooperation amongst HNC educators, streamlining workflows between departments, and increasing communication efficiency between students and faculty.