When Chelsea Tan arrived in Fort Collins in August 2012, she was already a celebrity on the CSU campus. She was the first student to confirm for a Pathway program at INTO CSU and she quickly became famous with the INTO CSU staff. In December 2016, Chelsea graduated from Colorado State University after four and a half years of being extremely active on campus.
Chelsea earned two degrees — a B.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology as well as a B.A. in Economics. She went home to Malaysia in January and will begin looking for a job in Hong Kong to gain some professional experience before she applies for graduate programs. She hopes to return to Colorado and earn her master’s degree from CSU.
“I believe having a degree from CSU will give me an advantage because the degree and all the experience I’ve learned from here is so much more valuable than back home,” she explained.
While she was successfully earning two degrees from CSU, Chelsea also was very involved across campus with different organizations and jobs. She was the president of both the CSU Global Ambassador Program and the CSU Malaysian Student Organization. Chelsea worked as a lead research assistant, where she was involved in meta-analysis and statistical analysis and managed six research assistants, and was responsible for the work produced from her team.
Student ambassador
In addition to English, she speaks Mandarin, Malay, Hokkien, and Cantonese, which proved very helpful when she worked as a student ambassador for INTO CSU for four years.
“One thing I really like about being a student ambassador is to be able to interact with different kinds of students, and problem solve their situation on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “The biggest takeaway I get from this experience is patience because a lot of our students don’t speak English as their first language, and they are here to learn English.”
Chelsea’s favorite experience at Colorado was visiting the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Southern Colorado. She remarked, “It was a very interesting experience because I went during Spring, and there was still snow. The view was so surreal and so breathtaking. That has to be my best experience here in Colorado.”
Chelsea said that the best thing she learned from her experience is to be out there.
“Being involved, I made so many connections, made so many friends. People have helped me out, I’ve helped people out. It’s just the best takeaway from this whole experience,” she said. “I don’t think I would do anything different from where I started off because every experience I’ve gained, every friendship I’ve made, was so valuable. It changes my perspective on life, so I wouldn’t change anything.”
