In the early 1900s, Buck went to America to attend college. She went to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She finished college in 1914. She then became a Presbyterian missionary like her father and returned to China. She left the missionary life in 1933, after the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, where Fundamentalists (people who thought the Christian Bible should be taught as it was and that ideas such as Darwinism were wrong) and Modernists (people who thought Darwinism was okay) in the Presbyterian church did not like each other.