Kwame Oppong Hackman đến từ Ghana: một lá thư điện tử dẫn đến học vị tiến sĩ ở Thanh Hoa

The email

Hackman came from a rural part of Ghana where the nearest school had no paved road and no electricity, and he was one of only two students from his village to reach secondary school. His family could not fund university, so he trained as a teacher at a tuition-free college, taught for two years, and then studied in South Africa and the United Kingdom on government support.

In January 2012, having completed a master's in the United Kingdom, he considered where to do a doctorate. He had read the work of a professor working in land use and biodiversity, and sent an email asking whether he could study under him. The reply came the same day, and was positive. Five months later he arrived in Beijing on a Chinese Government Scholarship.

Why the supervisor route worked

The lesson is not that cold emails always succeed — most do not — but that the email was specific and grounded. It named a field, referenced the professor's actual research, and came from someone who had already completed a master's and could describe what he wanted to work on.

His supervisor's own description of him is "hard-working" and "sincere", and the output bears that out: Tsinghua requires doctoral candidates to publish two papers in international journals during their studies; Hackman published five.

What he says he gained

He reduces five years to two words: diligence and support. On diligence, he describes an atmosphere in which not studying feels wrong, with classmates working from early morning to late at night, and says the influence of that environment was one of the biggest things he took away.

On support, he is emphatic that the academic backing he received at Tsinghua exceeded what he had experienced in South Africa and the United Kingdom — funding, laboratory access and a supervisor who contacted him first whenever there was a conference or collaboration opportunity. He also notes that his supervisor remained in contact after graduation.

After graduation

Hackman turned down work abroad and returned to Kumasi, Ghana's second city, to work as a researcher at the Building and Road Research Institute, applying his doctorate to land use and biodiversity mapping in western Ghana.

His case also illustrates a broader pattern: China's student numbers from Ghana rose from around 3,700 in 2014 to more than 6,500 in 2017, and Chinese-trained graduates returning to West Africa have become a visible professional cohort in trade, agriculture, health, communications and energy.