Preface
Four years passed by in a flash. Looking back, the memories are still vivid. The clearest in my mind are the bits and pieces from Zijingang - no advisors keeping watch, plenty of club and organization activities, days of carefree happiness, you might say. Now that I think about it, I still didn't really study hard or train my own abilities; much of that time was wasted away... or rather, due to my low study efficiency, it was squandered on endless homework.
So, taking the occasion of graduation, let me briefly look back on undergraduate life.
Pre-Freshman
After the gaokao, I missed the cutoff for Peking University main campus by two points, while just scraping into the Medical Department. At the time I was tired of being nagged by my homeroom teacher, and given that I still wanted to learn some computer technology, when fellow-townsman Mr. Zhang came for recruitment, I came to know about Zhejiang University. "Oh, there's also a Zhejiang University? And the ranking isn't bad?" hhhh I heard the major could be freely chosen, so I picked the Information and Industrial Engineering broad-major group, whose admission score was a good fit. If we really must count "university" beginning then, the summer after the gaokao should probably count as the start? Thinking carefully about it, back then I just took some online MOOCs (worth 0.5 second-classroom credits), and then went off to military training. As for the 2018 military training - looking back now, the scenes are still vivid. Standing sentry at the Bifeng gate, morning training and evening critiques at Ziyun, lining up and cutting in line to grab food at the canteen, intensive writing of application letters, holding a rifle as the lead in the chorus, frantic head-spinning attempts to tidy internal affairs, staying up all night washing clothes and writing drafts... that life was so lovable too. Compared with the various brain-burning courses that came later, the pure physical activity of military training was rather joyful~
Freshman Year
Administrative Class
At ZJU, freshmen are organized into administrative classes; in sophomore year, the administrative classes disband and everyone enters their major-specific class. Because the administrative class only lasts a short time, people don't get all that close...
Roommates
The roommates were okay - everyone was polite and courteous, and there was no staying up late on voice chat playing games. At the start I'd get up early in the morning to read English on the balcony, but later my roommates said I was disturbing their sleep, so I stopped after that.
Clubs
I really like ping pong (you can see this from the way I'd hand in my high school physics-competition paper early and slip off to play ping pong, hhh), so I sought out the Ping Pong Association on my own initiative. I felt I wasn't articulate enough for External Affairs or HR, and didn't play well enough for the Technical department, so when I saw that the Publicity department welcomed those with no foundation, I signed up for Publicity~ The interview overall was quite nice!
Later I got into the Publicity department as I'd hoped. To be honest, when I actually got in touch with the work, I did regret it a bit. Only then did I learn that the Publicity department was responsible for pre-event publicity, mid-event photography and venue support, and post-event reporting. Pre-event publicity included posters, roll-up banners, horizontal banners, and tweets; mid-event and post-event reporting consisted of tweets. As a typical stereotypical "traditional science" (high school) / "engineering" (college) male, my aesthetic sense was rather poor, and I knew nothing about layout, composition, etc., let alone tools like Photoshop or Xiumi. There were also many events: the Three-Goods Cup, Summer Cup, Spring Cup, Freshman Cup, "Helping You Score Full GPA", as well as the weekly Grassroots Cup, and so on. Fortunately the department head was capable enough that, with each round of internal training, she led us along bit by bit, and we managed to pull off events one after another.
A rather unfortunate thing was that we'd recruited 9 people back then, but later, due to the heavy pressure on the Publicity department, 4 quit, and all the workload was divvied up among the remaining 5.
What it left me with later was the feeling that the Publicity department is a place that's more like the concept of an "organization" hhh. Department meetings were never very lively, either.
Organizations
I'd heard from the older students that one usually joins 2 clubs/organizations, so I planned to sign up for one organization too.
Out of an inexplicable yearning for the library (I felt the university library was a very romantic place), combined with my being an Information student, and most importantly because that one evening at the entrance to the campus, an older female student took the initiative to hand me a flyer~ Through this twist of fate I came in contact with the wonderful organization Library Assistants, and signed up for the Systems R&D department that very evening.
I still remember the night of the Library Assistants first-round interview. Normally withdrawn, I performed quite excitedly. One of the interviewers asked, "On your application form you said you're rather introverted, but going by your performance it doesn't seem so?" I said, "I've always been introverted, and coming to college I hope to make some changes. This interview is one form of training for me~"
I passed the first round. The second round was an on-the-spot event-planning session, where everyone discussed how to run an event, how to make contingency plans, and so on. When I reported in to the senior, I noticed her face wasn't very pleasant; when I asked about it she said the discussion had been terrible, simply unbearable to listen to, hhh. At the end of the second round we asked everyone how many clubs/organizations they'd signed up for and whether they'd passed. One guy had even signed up for 3 organizations, and passed all of them... When we talked about it afterwards, the senior said she'd decided then and there not to take him.
What I hadn't expected was that the Systems department was mainly responsible for maintaining the website, modifying the legacy code passed down from predecessors as needed for our work. Modifying code generally meant simple things, like changing some text on the front-end webpage. Another type was using the back-end management interface to adjust holiday settings, reset passwords, and so on.
Choosing a Major
As I said at the start, I liked computer-related disciplines, so I picked Information and Industrial Engineering. At the time I knew nothing about CS, software engineering, or information security, but who hasn't had a hacker dream, hhh? So I chose information security. Looking back, the interview was extremely naive, truly an outpouring of patriotism through learning. "I want to contribute to the country" - I don't know how many times I said it. I still remember being asked why I'd applied for information security, and I said my interest in the field originated from a hacker dream, then I came to recognize the importance of cybersecurity, and that I'd come to ZJU specifically for this major, etc. - in any case, very firm. Of course, firmness was one side of it; thinking carefully now, my not choosing the more crowded CS major was also partly out of fear of not being selected, and not wanting to compete with the big shots who'd already touched information competitions in high school. In the end I lived up to expectations and became a member of Information Security 1801.
Sophomore Year
Clubs
I stayed on as the Publicity department head. Only then did I discover that Publicity is a rather awkward department... because the workload is heavy and the work is rather important~ (after all, Publicity is the face of a club, hhh). Every time we divvied up tasks I had to be careful, fearing I'd scare off the kids (bushi). I'd also personally show up for various activities~ A regret, however, was that communication between departments was never very plentiful, and internal building was not great. Fortunately the kids we recruited were all very nice~ When recruiting, since it's generally hard to muster up the ideal number (around 10), the priority on selection is fairly high~ One can also recommend a few people in directly, hhh. When I was earlier serving as a senior-mentor-group member, there was a kid who was quite good - I got him in by recommendation!
Organizations
I stayed on as the Systems department head. The Systems department had previously been somewhat marginalized, since not many activities were organized and there didn't seem to be much actual work, putting it in a precarious position of nearly being divided up. Later I learned that, beyond what I'd been responsible for before, at the department-head level one also had to have a fairly clear understanding of the website's overall code logic and database. We could directly modify backend data~ A fairly rigorous task, you might say. During my time as department head, the main things I did were canceling the old rule that internships were unpaid, and improving the display state after volunteer-aid evaluation passes. The Library Assistants website used a JQuery+PHP+MySQL stack, with heavy use of ajax. It was relatively easy to read. That year as Systems department head I was mainly busy with internal training...
Senior Mentor Group
Sister Diao led the senior mentor group~ I met many cute kids from Information and Industrial Engineering 1917 (recommended one to the Ping Pong Association and one to Library Assistants, hhh). Many of them I've still kept in touch with later. The senior mentor group's main job was the icebreakers before the class-and-corps formation, and bringing the kids around in queues to various venues during orientation week. Once military training started, they were no longer under our charge (though during military training we joined with other senior mentor groups to send their company some watermelons~).
By tradition, the senior mentor group has to treat the freshmen to a barbecue. Although I don't enjoy livening up the atmosphere and just kept my head down eating, the awkwardness was at least bearable. We frantically invited our class advisor, who was already abroad on business, to come eat with us, then frantically expressed our regret. Eventually we successfully hinted, and the teacher reimbursed it (over 1000 yuan)~
Awards and Honors
What's worth noting is that sophomore year was the only year of undergraduate that I won absolutely no awards or honors... Mainly because of the pandemic, I disliked online classes, and my study quality was poor. What's more, many exams were postponed to after the summer, and my personal study style is to listen carefully in class and complete homework well, not to prep for exams; that meant by exam time I'd forgotten a lot of things, and my grades were terrible.
At the awards-and-honors evaluation later, I was one place short of various exemplar titles, so I couldn't be named outstanding student or get a scholarship. Fortunately I got the school's First-Class Award in both freshman and junior year, which let me apply for the Provincial Outstanding Graduate honor at the end.
Letter Carrier
I signed up to be a letter carrier for the College of Computer Science office, riding the campus shuttle on Wednesday mornings to drop by various offices and see whether there were any errands - delivering materials to various places at Zijingang. It was a bit RPG-like, but actually rather time-consuming - the shuttle took over an hour each way, plus the materials might need delivering to various places at Zijingang, so it was rather troublesome. (Mildly socially-anxious-friendly.)
Junior Year
Roommates
We could only form teams within the same class... Originally I'd already lined up classmates from the same college but different majors; then helplessly I had to find roommates again. The new roommates were like the previous ones - everyone polite and courteous, no conflicts, but also nothing close. Overall, the roommates I encountered over my four undergraduate years were all rather peaceful and respectful in a hands-off way... I don't like that.
I hope when I go to graduate school, the roommate I'm assigned will be someone I didn't previously know, and very talkative!
Part-Time Counselor
Sister Wan posted a part-time counselor recruitment in the group chat - juniors and seniors could also apply. On a whim, I signed up. At the time I was just thinking, "Now that I'm a junior, having moved to Yuquan with no more clubs or organization activities, this is exactly the time to do something for the college", so I dropped two courses for it. The interview was rather awkward; I'd prepared three points to introduce three of my traits, but because I was so nervous, I got stuck for a long time at the start of each of the three points... how embarrassing. At the end of the interview, Sister Wan said that, considering juniors have classes, they'd generally consider seniors. In fact I'd noticed this while waiting in line outside - few juniors had applied. But to my surprise, I was later selected, as the only third-year part-time counselor, hhh.
For some reason I was the only part-time counselor in my cohort - originally there were supposed to be about 3. I worked under Mr. Fei, who hadn't shown up at the interview that day. When we first met afterwards he asked what I was good at and what aspect I wanted to improve. I said I didn't know, anything was fine. Later it turned into a situation where, whenever he was overwhelmed, he'd call me to do work. I felt this arrangement was fine.
Deputy Company Commander of the Tenth Company
For some reason, when I saw the recruitment for military training officers, I felt like signing up. Since the 2019 training had been canceled due to the pandemic, the 2020 training combined the 2020 and 2021 cohorts: the 2020 cohort in July, the 2021 cohort in August. There'd also been a sophomore military training before, with the 2016 cohort, and they were extremely hard to manage (which is why I'd originally signed up for deputy instructor for the 2021 cohort). Plans never keep up with changes - in 2021 the situation was special: in July there was a troop redeployment, and all university military trainings were canceled. So it was changed to August, with both cohorts training simultaneously. In the end I went to the deputy-company-commander role I least wanted (I really can't lead troops!!!) - it was truly a strange twist of fate.
Senior Year
Branch Deputy Secretary
I really hadn't expected I'd serve as deputy secretary? Oh boy! This term the branch only had 4 official Party members, so it was a do-or-die situation. Later, one of them planned to go abroad and was no longer coming to school, so he wouldn't serve on the branch committee. Another one was currently doing an internship and not coming to school either, leaving just two comrades to do the work... Fortunately the other one was very capable too! Over two semesters we held thirteen branch general meetings; from initially having to write out word-for-word scripts, to later being able to just throw together a PowerPoint and start presenting directly - in both mindset and capability we matured a great deal.
In the final transition, Ziao came on as the next deputy secretary. A smooth handover!
Lab Life
The seniors in the lab are all very nice; everyone throws themselves wholeheartedly into research, and the lights in rooms 420 and 320 stay on constantly, even at one or two in the morning.
The senior who guided my undergraduate thesis is amazing - it feels like she's online at all times, doesn't need rest, and her work efficiency is uncanny. Salute!
Graduation
To be honest, graduation didn't bring me too many feelings, even the graduation ceremony and degree-conferral ceremony. Maybe because I was still going to stay on through summer break, and would continue studying at Yuquan afterwards. Even my graduation photos were just group photos taken with my class and cohort - I didn't book a photographer to take any nice pictures. Maybe I felt that the bachelor's is just the beginning, and putting effort into checking off landmarks would just be a waste of time, without much meaning.
Summary
Over four years, I don't really feel I rolled and competed all that much, and in the end I won Provincial Outstanding Graduate and Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis. The only shortcoming - and the biggest issue - is that I feel I've always been pushed along by others, lacking subjective initiative. I hope that in the upcoming graduate stage I can soon possess "independent thought"!