From Invercargill to Duke University

All things being equal, Michael Zhang should have been enjoying his graduation from prestigious Duke University next week.

Zhang has spent the past four years at the North Carolina research university, which boasts former United States president Richard Nixon and 14 living billionaires amongst its alma mater.

However, instead of his mother travelling to Durham for her first visit to campus, Zhang returned to New Zealand ahead of the border closure and completed his final project work towards a Bachelor of Science and Engineering in electrical computer engineering from his Invercargill home.

It’s been a decade since Zhang grabbed headlines as the youngest-ever winner of a Southland table tennis title when he beat Jason Peters to claim the men’s crown at the Southland Residential championships.

Peters was gunning for a 10th title. Zhang was 13-years-old at the time. Logan Savory suggested in his story for the Southland Times that people should mark the name down for the future. He wasn’t wrong.

“I remember that tournament quite clearly. I was not the favourite to win and I guess I just really wanted that game,” Zhang told me this week.

“In the finals my opponent was much stronger, I was 13 and I really wanted that game. I fought hard and I stole that win from him and it changed my table tennis trajectory a little bit.”

It’s been an interesting trajectory, that’s for sure.

Zhang’s Southland win was his first major tournament victory, but he would go on to compete nationally, becoming known around New Zealand as the kid from Invercargill with a tonne of potential.

Unfortunately, the sort of exacting training required to advance in the sport was difficult to come by in Southland and just a couple of years later Zhang felt his motivation declining as his Auckland and Canterbury rivals started to progress faster than him.

Advice and support provided through the Academy Southland programme helped him gain control over his table tennis destiny.

“Honestly, competing nationally – I just didn’t have the same drive to win, that feeling I’d had in the Southland Residentials when I was 13, how much I wanted to win that final compared to how I was competing at 16, there was a huge difference between the two mindsets. I was feeling resentful that I wasn’t getting good training, I wasn’t improving and then the Academy changed me in numerous ways. They really put a lot of effort into me.”

After seriously considering putting his paddle down, he would make it back to national level.

Table tennis also played a significant role in his studies, forming a major part of his application for Duke University after first heading to the University of Canterbury.

Winning a sought-after Robertson Scholarship, Zhang has made the most of his opportunities in the United States, not only succeeding academically and for the Duke table tennis team, but also as a talented jazz musician.

Having competed strongly in classical piano during his time in Invercargill, Zhang transitioned to jazz in his teens and has been able to develop his love for the art form in the United States.

“There are some big names in North Carolina, I got to play with some pretty cool people out there and I grew a lot musically,” Zhang said.

“Duke is a great incubator for all those things. In table tennis, Duke has so many resources and the college tournament system is really great. There are several tournaments a year for college students and Duke pays for all of them, our travel and our food. They paid for us to go to Dusseldorf, Germany in my first year to practise with the German national team. This year they were going to send us to Taiwan.”

Zhang was initially taken aback by the culture at Duke, where the norm is to be academically driven, enjoy a rich social life, as well as actively being involved in personal pursuits including business or sport, but he was able to adapt quickly.

A summer internship with Microsoft has turned into a fulltime role in the technology behemoth’s internet-of-things team starting in August.

He’s interested in the way data can be captured to make systems more efficient. At an individual level, the advancement of smart watches – as an example - can be used to improve health, but there are even bigger applications possible at the enterprise level.

Zhang counts himself lucky to be moving to such a well-established company at a time when other new graduates are having their contracts at smaller firms rescinded due to a Covid-19 affected economy.

It’s one of the reasons he’s offered to tutor for free at James Hargest until he can start his new job in Seattle later in the year.