Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, USTB has responded to the call of the State Council to plan and deploy additional funding to students in order to meet their needs during this special epidemic period.

One of USTB’s primary goals has been to improve communication with students in order to better assess their needs while fighting the epidemic. Together, the Chancellor and President of USTB established an online course for staff and students in order to encourage them to strengthen their ideological thinking and understand their responsibilities towards USTB. The student work system has become well integrated into students’ lives, allowing for counselors to be on call 24 hours a day and get in touch daily with every student, ensuring graduate and undergraduate student instructors maintain one-on-one contact with those in their class, and maintaining the operation of the student party branch and class meetings to ensure accurate information about aspects of student’s financial difficulties, their learning environment, equipment shortages and psychological distress are relayed and solved in a timely fashion. Funding has been made available for students with financial difficulties in areas hit particularly hard by the epidemic, as well as poverty-stricken and rural areas. Special attention has also been given to students with difficulties such as officially registering their situations, subsistence living, special hardship assistance and disabilities. These measures have provided support for 2,784 undergraduate students with financial difficulties as well as dozens of students with temporary difficulties.

In order to help provide student funding to fight the epidemic USTB has worked to implement a comprehensive policy for establishing financial support. During the period of epidemic prevention and control, USTB formulated a special funding policy based on the needs international students, currently enrolled students and graduated students. USTB also arranged activities for students who stayed at school during the winter holiday, distributing gifts and masks, and some financial support. Subsidies and assistance were provided to students whose families had financial difficulties due to the COVID-19 outbreak, students who lacked equipment to participate in online courses, students who had difficulty in paying internet data fees for online learning, etc. The university also approved 376,400 RMB for undergraduate and graduate students funds, opened financial green channels and gave approval to promptly and fully pay awards, grants, and food allowances, with a total of over 4 million RMB being issued. To date, the information of the part-time work-assisted students of 42 party and administrative departments and teaching and scientific research departments in USTB has been collected and nearly 417,700 RMB has been paid to working students. Additionally, more than 60,000 RMB has been used for purchasing and sending protective materials such as masks to students living in severely affected areas, as well as providing special grants for 692 students in Hubei province. For those graduate students currently repaying their national student loan, and those who either cannot currently repay or have lost their ability to repay due to the epidemic, USTB has implemented a policy alleviate the financial pressure from them.

Finally, USTB has given priority to educating its students in order to fight COVID-19. Staff from the Student Financial Aid Center in collaboration with the Center for Student Learning and Development, Mental Health Education & Counseling Center and other departments designed the “Warm Heart Education Program” to address student needs during the epidemic period. In order to better make use of the work-study program and help the various university departments carry out the work of epidemic prevention and control and online teaching effectively, USTB set up temporary positions for online work-study assistance, selecting students who were motivated, possessed strict discipline and applicable skills to be responsible for online publicity, gathering statistics and other work. At the same time, USTB established temporary work-study positions as part of the “Learning Materials - Warm Heart Express Delivery” program, which in cooperation with the Work-Study Center selected students who stayed on campus during the holiday to help send materials that had been left in dormitories by students who left for the holiday including laptops, learning materials, etc. In total 1,082 packages were sent to students across China. This program not only solved the practical difficulties of students at home and allowed them to continue their studies, but also provided the students on campus an opportunity to help others. The Student Financial Aid Center, Center for Student Learning and Development and Mental Health Education & Counseling Center also started activities called “Fighting for Hubei” and “Write a Letter to Classmates in Hubei” in order to introduce the economic, academic, psychological and other safeguard measures provided by USTB to students, provide educational guidance and service support, encourage students to study and do research, and finally strengthen their confidence in order to win the fight against epidemic.

SOURCE: WANG Jinrui

(Statistics in text are current as of late March, 2020).