(now known as Nanjing University) and first majored in mathematics but later transferred to physics. She became involved in student politics. Relations between China and Japan were tense at this time, and students were urging the government to take a stronger line with Japan. Wu was elected as one of the student leaders by her colleagues because they felt that since she was one of the top students at the university, her involvement would be forgiven, or at least overlooked, by the authorities. That being the case, she was careful not to neglect her studies. She led protests that included a sit-in at the Presidential Palace in Nanjing, where the students were met by Chiang Kai-shek. For two years after graduation, she did graduate-level study in physics and worked as an assistant at Zhejiang University. She became a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Academia Sinica. Her supervisor was Gu Jing-Wei, a female professor who had earned her PhD abroad at the University of Michigan and encouraged Wu to do the same. She became an important role model to the young Wu, who developed confidence and was sometimes blunt and honest when giving advice to close friends. Wu was accepted by the University of Michigan, and her uncle, Wu Zhou-Zhi, provided the necessary funds. She embarked for the United States with a female friend and chemist from Taicang, Dong Ruo-Fen (), on the in August 1936. Her parents and uncle saw her off at the Huangpu Bund as she boarded the ship. Her father and uncle were very sad while her mother was in tears that day, and little did Wu know that she would never see her parents again. Though her family would survive the Second World War, she would only visit the remaining members of her family decades later when she made trips to China in the 1970s. Early physics career Berkeley Wu and Dong Ruo-Fen arrived in San Francisco, where Wu's plans for graduate study changed after visiting the University of California, Berkeley. She met physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, a middle-class grandson from the concubine of Yuan Shikai (the self-proclaimed president of the new Republic of China and Emperor of China for six months before his passing). As a result of his political lineage, Luke did not talk much about Yuan Shikai and Wu would tease him after she discovered the truth since her father