How Research Helped Me Navigate Academic and Future Career Paths

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Tommy Zeng ('25), an International Relations major, researched China's legal system, reforms, and engagement with international law during the post-1978 Reform Era through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program (PURM).

I was involved in a research project titled “China’s Law at Home and Abroad” led by Prof. Jacques deLisle from Penn Carey Law. My primary task was to assist Prof. deLisle on a variety of his specific research projects, academic writings, and talks and lectures related to China’s law, legal system, and legal reforms, as well as China’s engagement with international law and international institutions in the post-1978 Reform Era. I was attracted to this project because of my background being an international student from China, my current academic track as an International Relations major, and my interest in attending law school in the future. Going to college in the United States means I don’t really have the opportunity to learn about Chinese law and China’s legal system systematically as I would have through pursuing a bachelor’s degree in laws in China, so I was extremely lucky and thankful to both be helpful to the work that Prof. deLisle did and learn from him important research, analytical, and writing skills that would be necessary for my academic goals.

I had never worked so closely with a professor before PURM and was at first a bit intimidated by the thought of communicating and meeting with my mentor on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. But my mentor made me feel very comfortable and confident soon by reaching out to me first, offering more details about the project, and encouraging me to get started without worrying over the initial quality of my contribution. Then, throughout the ten-week program, we met and discussed the research subjects regularly both in person and on Zoom, and Prof. deLisle was always accessible via email and usually responded to my questions within the day. I felt extremely comfortable sharing my thoughts and ideas with him as he made a genuine effort to listen to and engage with my opinions and provide constructive feedback to my work. It was highly rewarding as I felt that my voice and perspectives were heard and valued and included in his work as well. One of the sub-projects we did was to turn a guest lecture Prof. deLisle had given into a journal piece on India-China border disputes. After helping him gather useful sources, Prof. deLisle shared the final article with me before publication and it was very rewarding and exciting to see how some of my work has been integrated into his writings.

The PURM experience provided me with an early look at what graduate study in related fields and law school education are like and helped me affirm my academic goals and think about future career paths.

The most important skills I developed over doing research this summer are reading and processing a large volume of academic sources in a short amount of time, summarizing and synthesizing information gathered from various scholarships, and assessing the quality and importance of scholarship sources. The nature of a law-centered research project meant that I was tasked with reading and processing both primary and secondary sources – official government statements, academic journal articles, news articles, think tanks reports, etc – and had to independently and objectively evaluate these sources and determine whether they would be helpful to Prof. deLisle’s work. Thus, being able to quickly identify relevant journal articles, fetch information from abstract and introduction, as well as summarize the key points are skills that I developed and improved upon over the course of the program. Moving forward, these skills will definitely be important to my study as an International Relations major and potentially a law student, and I intend to use them at any courses that have a research and academic writing component. - Tommy Zeng

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