The fledgling tradition reflects Faust’s personal experiences attending girls’ schools and how that shaped “the way I saw the world.” Just before her thirteenth birthday, Faust, who grew up in Virginia, was shipped off to Concord Academy, which was an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts at the time.

“It was intellectually rigorous and took girls seriously,” Faust says of Concord Academy. “It gave me a kind of purposefulness that just wasn’t available in the Virginia environment.”

Bryn Mawr, her alma mater, offered a similar experience, as the women’s liberal arts college boasted its faculty, Faust says.

Meeting with girls at schools abroad often sheds light on differences between education in the U.S. and in other countries, Faust says.

“They’re very ambitious intellectually and educationally—they were worried about balancing a career and family,” Faust says of the girls in Shanghai. “I talked about how important it was for me, being in a girls’ school, and how that had been a significant part of believing in myself.”

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction.

CORRECTION: MAR. 29, 2011

The Dec. 18, 2009 article "Around the World with Faust" incorrectly stated that University President Drew G. Faust was the first Harvard president to visit the African continent. In fact, former University President Derek C. Bok first visited Africa on a trip in 1975.