The National Day Holiday

It is the week for the National Day holiday, so I can settle down to write something about my life. In late September, those senior students who were recommended to take postgraduate program without qualifying examination, including me, were anxiously waiting for the announcement of final admission result. Consequently, after that, I have fun without worrying about any workload and pressure.

Usually speaking, one must take a qualifying examination followed by an interview in their final year or after graduation as the procedure of selection to access a certain university or institute for postgraduate study, specifically for a master degree. However, the examination is so time-consuming and fiercely competitive because it usually conquers nearly a half in the final year to prepare, when around four million examinees will make their best to study day in day out for only one million positions in this country. More extremely, for some hot majors in top universities, dozens of examinees fight for one postgraduate position. Considering such cruelty and uncertainty of exam and in order to decrease the pressure of top students, a certain percent of undergraduates is recommended by their schools or colleges every year to skip the examination part and merely take interview as the whole story. In this case, those recommended students will have a less stressful final year to devote more time on the final year project and their future graduate program. Luckily enough, my university is excellent as being a member of Double First Class University Plan, C9 League, Project 985 and Project 211, hence more student, around 30% in total, could be recommended to their dream university, and on the other hand making it a tenser and more competitive atmosphere since a bunch of our mates have been diligently studying for years to access a better university in the future, which we described as “involution”.

The recommendation was like a praise to our assiduous study in the past three years in the university. In Xi’an Jiaotong, the sole criterium for recommendation is the integrative ranking of students in a major or college. The int. ranking encompasses two parts, intelligence and morality. Intelligence, in other words, is arguably equal to GPA but contains potential bonus points, and morality is quantified by achievements in some extracurricular activities in fields of sports, arts, competitions and so on together with punishing points if one disobeys discipline or even law. In together, they provide a general perspective to evaluate an undergraduate in his first three years and quantifies the evaluation in centesimal grade.

As for the interview, nearly all the universities and institutes now prefer to arrange during the summer break or early and middle September. The summer one is usually named as “summer camp”, which is right what I wrote in the past few months. They will systematically assess the capable ability and potential of a student on his English, critical and scientific thinking, command of knowledge, etc. Fortunately, I successfully past the interview of Tsinghua, CEMCS and IRCBC. After days of consideration, I decided to take Tsinghua’s offer and filled the application chart online on 28^th Sept.

After confirmation, I spend all my National Day holiday on entertainment as reward.

One of the destinations is the Botanic Garden of Xi’an, in which chrysanthemum was putting forth the colorful flowers vigorously. Miss 🐑 and I took the metro there, thanks to the cloudy day, we didn’t feel too tired and dehydrated exploring every independent park. However, the most deserved one is definitely the chrysanthemum theme park because most of the other flowers were withering during the autumn and winter, making chrysanthemum a pearl in the somber autumn. I was not sure about the specific name of each species, but I was really impressed by the sophisticated designation of chrysanthemum park and the multifarious color they presented.

I was also present in an annual banquet with dual alumni of Huizhou No.1 Senior High School and Xi’an Jiaotong, my high school and university, separately. In other words, all the participants were the graduate from my high school and current undergrads in my univ. Therefore, as a year 4 student I was the most senior ones in this banquet. Another peculiar thing was that no female was present because no a single girl from my high school applied Xi’an Jiaotong this year, and this phenomenon has lasted throughout my entire undergraduate life. Hence, this annual banquet has an alias called MM, i.e., Male Meal. Since this is my last MM in my undergraduate, all I hope is to make acquaintance to the freshmen and encourage them to work hard.