Xin Qi, a grad student on the Vancouver campus, is taking on new challenges — including writing code for a game prototype and co-founding a studio.
Xin Qi, a graduate student in computer science at Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus, recently attended a game developer incubator event sponsored by Canadian Game Devs.
During the month-long program, she wrote all the code for her team’s prototype and identified and fixed bugs in the code. After the event, the group decided to continue collaborating, forming a studio to further develop their game, “Sheila the Shackled.”
And Qi credits much of her achievement to dragon boating — yes, the sport where paddlers race long, dragon-themed boats across the water.
Qi says the sport gave her the confidence she was missing.
“Dragon boating somehow changed my way of thinking about things,” she said. “It gave me the courage to try something for the first time.”
Qi is in her second year of Northeastern’s Align program — designed for students without a computing background — after earning her undergraduate degree in journalism from Zhejiang University in her hometown of Hangzhou, China.
When she arrived at Northeastern, it wasn’t just the computer science coursework that was new to Qi — it was the culture of enjoying an activity for the sheer fun of it.
When Qi was younger, the expectation was that she had to excel — if not be the best — at everything she tried. So, despite her love for water sports, she never signed up for dragon boating in Hangzhou, home to an annual festival on West Lake.
“Usually when people do something for the first time, they are likely to fail because that is their first time,” she said. “So in the past, I didn’t dare do something new because I was afraid.”
That changed when Qi was invited by Northeastern Global Learner Support specialist Joseph Clark to join the campus dragon boating team. She was surprised to learn such a team existed and hesitated at first, assuming it would be as competitive and demanding as the one at Zhejiang University, where players underwent intense daily training for months before races.
“When I heard about the dragon boat team here on the Vancouver campus, I didn’t think I could manage to join it,” she said.
But it turned out that the only requirements were to register, complete four training sessions and be on time for practice.
“I thought maybe I should go on and have a try,” Qi recalled. “I have always been interested in water activities because I love rivers and the sea and you know Vancouver is a city famous for its water.”
For a month, Qi’s team trained on False Creek, the inlet that separates downtown Vancouver from the West End. Over those weeks, the team got faster and its rowing rhythm became more harmonious. In June came the Dragon Boat Festival.
On the day of the race, Qi’s team could see that they were competing against more serious rowers. The other rowers were strong and athletic and had more modern paddles than Qi’s team. But once the race started, all they were focused on was rowing.
The team didn’t perform well in the first round, Qi said, but they improved with each race. She remembers hearing the crowd cheering them on, even though they weren’t the fastest boat. In the end, her team finished second in the premier mixed tail final race.
“When I wore the silver medal on the stage, I felt like I was in the center of the world,” Qi wrote in an essay about the race for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “I couldn’t hold back my tears when I realized that I no longer needed to hesitate to start something new.
“I came to Canada to learn computer science, but I have learned life lessons beyond the technical skills.”