Bao Xinxin, a recipient of the Spring Bud project and a third-year graduate student at Jilin Agricultural University, is committed to living up to the expectations of charity-minded individuals and safeguarding the country's food safety with professional knowledge.

Bao comes from an ordinary family in Kulun banner of Tongliao city, north China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Bao said that when she was 13 years old, her mother suffered a cerebral thrombosis and could no longer work; from that moment, her father became the family's sole bread-winner.

It was a huge burden for Bao's father to earn enough money to cover her mother's medical bills and the tuition fees for both her and her brother. Therefore, their relatives and friends often lent a helping hand.

Bao started to receive financial aid from the Spring Bud project when she was a high school student at Kulun No.2 Middle School. Her father often told her to study hard, remain grateful to people from all social sectors for their compassion and benevolence, and to meet their expectations through her outstanding performance at school.

Bao won school-level scholarships twice during her three-year high school life. She said that the Spring Bud project provided her with the additional strength to move ahead and strive to make a difference for both her and her family through personal efforts.

In the autumn of 2017, Bao was accepted into the School of Food Science and Engineering at Jilin Agricultural Science and Technology University.

Bao didn't have a clear understanding of the importance of her major in the early days, only believing that it would be relatively easy for her to land a job after graduation.

Under the guidance of her teachers, Bao’s initial perception of the major started to change. She began learning more about food safety issues, and realized the importance of what she was studying.

As a result, Bao studied hard in each class and proactively took part in both academic and practical activities, hoping to deepen the connectivity between theoretical knowledge and pragmatic purposes.

Bao later decided she wished to continue her education having realized that the more she learned throughout her major, the more eager she became to engage in in-depth research. She began to prepare for the national graduate school entrance examinations in her third year at university, study in the library up until she sat the test.

Bao passed the national graduate school entrance examination and the secondary tests with high scores and received an admission letter from Jilin Agricultural University.

Her new life at Jilin Agricultural University provided Bao with more opportunities to embrace knowledge in a broader space and at a deeper level, injecting fresh vitality into her studies.

Thanks to her extraordinary performance, Bao was drafted into a joint training program on agricultural processing undertaken by the Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences..

To date, Bao has persisted in reading professional journals in both Chinese and English, and has taken part in case studies, practical operations, the cultivation, selection and appraisal of strains.

During an interview, Bao introduced that she has been working on the research of beverage strains, the measurement of nutritional content and the exploration of product property. She disclosed that a self-developed fat-burning beverage could positively transform the impacts of fat-heavy diets on people's liver when it enters the market.

"Although it is always a long journey for researchers, including herself, to roll out new products in the market, I maintain the firm belief that nothing is impossible as long as people have determination and resilience and dare to make a comeback after failure," Bao stressed and added that she will continuously carry forward the spirit of the Spring Bud project and integrate personal endeavors with a dedication to public food safety.