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“Being here is my beginning,” says Zuan Xu, a native of China who is a wife, a mother, and an honors student.

When Zuan, who is 34, came to Dalton State last fall, she was looking for a challenge, an inspiration, a way to make her life “better and brighter.”

She found that inspiration on campus, where she enrolled in 16 credit hours and earned a 3.63 GPA last semester.

Zuan’s success is all the more admirable given the fact that her knowledge of English was fairly limited before she enrolled.

“English is my second language,” says Zuan, noting that “there’s no doubt I sometimes have some difficulties with it, but when I do, I solve those difficulties, and that makes me feel really good.

“I want to be a good example to my family and to my daughters,” says Zuan, whose husband Mingzhan Wu is a software engineer with Beaulieu and whose daughters Emily and Jennifer are aged four and two.

In her native Shanghai, Zuan graduated from high school and later studied German, earning a certificate in the language. In 1998, she went to work as an interpreter for a German-based company.

When she joined her husband in the states during the Christmas holiday in 1999, Zuan knew some English but very little about American culture. She recalls that when Mingzhan picked her up at the Atlanta airport on Christmas Day, there were “no other cars on the freeway, just ours.”

Her first few years in the states were spent as a full-time mother and homemaker while her husband completed his master’s degree at Georgia Tech. But once Zuan and Mingzhan moved to Dalton, in 2004, she wanted to expand her horizons.

“I want to know more, to learn more,” says Zuan, who says she feels driven to succeed, and encourages herself each evening at bedtime by recalling the positive steps she’s made that day toward her goal.

“I like to tell myself that whatever difficulties I’ve had that day have been a ‘piece of cake,’” she says, “because I feel like withdrawing from the difficulties of learning a new language is of no use at all. You have to move on.”

Her success with German and English has inspired her to study French, and she’s enrolled in Elementary French I this semester. But she also loves the mathematics and sciences. Currently majoring in Business Administration, Zuan would like to become a certified public accountant (CPA) one day.

Zuan was invited to join the College’s Honors Program this spring because of her academic success and aptitude for learning.

Her first Honors class is a Critical Thinking seminar where she and a small group of Honors students gather biweekly to engage in lively discussions about their assigned reading materials, usually related to important topics of the day.

“We are required to read a lot. It’s pretty fascinating. I enjoy knowing something that I didn’t know before.”