On Aug 11, Westlake University, China's first private non-profit research-oriented university, released the admission information for its doctorate programs that will be launched this year.

Based in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, the university will welcome a record high 313 fresh doctorate students. The university's School of Life Sciences, School of Science, and School of Engineering respectively enrolled 140, 66 and 107 students respectively.

In line with its commitment to gender equality, 43 percent of the students in the new cohort are female.

Sixty of the 313 new doctorate students, or 19.2 percent of them, hold bachelor's or master's degrees from overseas universities, up from 10 percent in 2019. This trend reflects the university's growing attractiveness to talents worldwide.

Most of the students with overseas degrees are Chinese nationals. The elite universities they attended before include Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, University of California Berkeley, University of California Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, University College London, Imperial College London, and National University of Singapore.

The top eight Chinese universities that the new doctorate students attended before are sequentially Zhejiang University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wuhan University, China Pharmaceutical University, Peking University, Nanjing University, and Sun Yat-sen University.

The doctorate students were born in 27 Chinese provinces, except for one French and one German. The provinces with the highest number of the enrolled students are Zhejiang, Henan, Shandong, and Jiangsu.

Westlake University's attractiveness to excellent students largely lies in its top-tier faculty which includes Shi Yigong, former vice-president of Tsinghua University, Chen Shiyi, former president of Southern University of Science and Technology, and Rao Yi, president of Capital Medical University.

A rendering of the Yungu campus of the Westlake University. The campus is expected to accommodate 300 independent laboratories when it becomes operational by the end of this year. [Photo/zj.zjol.com.cn]