Bucknell University Athletics
Bucknell Great Justin Zackey Now a Key Player in China
9/13/2011 8:00:00 AM | Men's Lacrosse
Sept. 13, 2011
Justin Zackey scored more goals (138) than any other player in Bucknell men's lacrosse history. In 1993, he led the nation with 63 goals and set a single-season record for the Bison. Today, Zackey's goals are a little more abstract — he's a geography professor at UCLA who also spends half of each year in Nanjing, China, running the UCLA Social Science Education in Asia program. He spoke with LM about travel, teaching and why it's hard to talk lax abroad.
When did your interest in travel and international affairs begin?
In college. I grew up very middle class, most of the time in a single-parent family, so we didn't do much traveling. I never went out of the country — our big vacation was to the Jersey Shore. In college I met Prof. Dick Peterec, and I took a political geography class with him. He led these summer trips that were classes, and he hired me as a teaching assistant. One summer we went to Eastern Europe and another summer, West Africa. It made me really realize I wanted to see other parts of the world.
What drew you so strongly to China?
When I was a senior at Bucknell, I got a Henry Luce fellowship. The scholarship is really cool —every year, they pick about 30 people between the ages of 20 and 30 and they send them over to Asia to work or study. One of the prerequisites is that you had no experience in Asia. It was a really competitive fellowship, and I luckily got it. They had two placements available, Indonesia and China. The China one was in southwest China, near Tibet and Burma. It's a really mountainous region with lots of ethnic minorities. I looked at the map and said, "Hey, that looks cool." So I taught English and did some research and travel, and fell in love with China. I've lived a total of almost six years in China since then.
Read the rest of the interview HERE.
