Bonderman Travel Fellowship

Kaiwen Sun

Kaiwen Sun 2013

Electrical Engineering; Philosophy with Interdisciplinary Honors

Undergraduate

2013 Fellows

Travel Locations: Russia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa

Kaiwen hopes to get to know and understand new and radically different cultural ideologies. He is fascinated by the way cultural values and world outlooks differ so much among different societies, and how difficult it is to reflect on them since they are so deeply ingrained. He is particularly interested in the way different cultural ideologies affect the beliefs, values, and interactions between people of those cultures, and what the differences tell us about how people can perceive life differently.

On the impact of the Bonderman Fellowship:

“It’s not that I can pin down the one day or even one week that was the most amazing, but rather the sum of all the days, the totality of the experience has been overwhelming. Every day is rather normal in its own way – everything is quite normal in its own context of the particular place I’m in, but now when I look back on it all, I realize that I have seen so much, done so much, learned so much.”