University

Where Is the University I Imagined?

I first noticed skywt, a senior student, when someone quoted him on their blog. One sentence stayed with me.

“Treat your four years at university as a gap year.”

I was already thinking about this in my first semester. Before university, I had so much to look forward to: I could write code on a computer, even take classes about writing code, instead of being stuck with Chinese, maths, English, physics, chemistry, biology… University life surely wouldn't be as tense as high school, either. I wouldn't have to work myself into a panic over every monthly exam…
But after one semester, I realized that the scars of exam-driven education were still there. I still got anxious when my marks weren't excellent. I still agonized over maths and physics problems I couldn't solve. I worried about my rank and GPA just as I had worried about my score on the gaokao, China's university entrance exam…
But isn't university a place to find yourself? Isn't it supposed to be a place of freedom? It gives us a platform and resources so we can learn what we want to learn, do what we truly want to do, see a bigger world. That was what university meant to me in the first place.

Doubts

What Is the Point?

Last week, I did my first university physics lab. It was probably the first physics experiment I'd ever done by myself.
It went pretty badly. I walked into the lab, looked at my equipment—oh, the worst set in the room—and stood there thinking for a while. Not about why I was so unlucky, but about this:

• What use is learning to measure a material's Young's modulus?
• I don't even know what Young's modulus is, and suddenly I'm supposed to measure it. Isn't this course just bullshit??
• I'm studying information security, on the software side. What am I meant to learn from an engineering materials experiment???

Xuan (萱) said she was pleasantly surprised by how “lively and fun” the experiment was. Honestly, that surprised me. Maybe I just hate physics too much. All the subject has left me with is painful memories, so yes, there's some personal bias there.
I remember how, in high school, I kept looking forward to one thing: “Once I get to university, I won't have to study this fucking physics anymore.” Now physics is one of my core courses. Fate has a sense of humor, apparently.

I still don't understand the point of the university physics curriculum. Here I am in a university classroom, hearing Newton's three laws, momentum, kinetic energy, and all the things I wanted to run away from in high school, all over again. It takes me back to my final year: I forced myself through 45 sets of past physics entrance-exam papers from across the country, feeling sick the whole time, just to get my one and only high-school physics score above 85. It was my gaokao score, too. At least I died for a cause.
I hate physics. Especially kinematics and dynamics.

I hate this course arrangement even more. Information security or software engineering—I'd happily take more maths. I'm not even asking the university to offer hands-on software courses in the first year. The 信科院's graduation requirement of 150+ on the CSP seems designed to train everyone as a computer science student anyway. I haven't seen much distinction between majors, at least not in the first year, or the second.
University just isn't what I imagined. I'm still caught in the same whirlpool.

Going Through the Motions

Even in high school, I'd mentally prepared myself for how much empty formality there would be at university, and in society generally. Turns out that doesn't stop the physical revulsion.
Leaving aside the point of last semester's mind-numbing, handwritten, 3,000-character psychological self-analysis, there are all these courses that end with students grinding through online videos and copying AI answers. Computer students practice handwriting; humanities students do maths problems; somehow these become assessment criteria. I can understand it as a way of providing jobs for teachers.
But I really don't understand the point of holding one empty competition after another and making class representatives beg everyone to participate.

You'd think we were back at one of those high-school pep rallies a hundred days before the gaokao. It makes me a little queasy. Never mind. Clear the memory.

Disappointment

Out of admiration for hackers, and the tiny bit of confidence I'd gained from maintaining school computers, I put “information security” or “cyberspace security” first for every university on my application list.
Then I discovered that all it really gave me was a so-called identity. In terms of career options, it might even be worse than “computer science and technology.”
I'd thought: now that I'm here, let's find some other starry-eyed nerds who want to be hackers, just like me. Then I looked around and realized that, in this major, perhaps even in this entire university, I was pretty much the only one with such a naive idea.
People reassigned here, people who missed their first choice, people with no interest…
I had nothing to say. I kept walking alone. Another layer of disappointment with university.

The next disappointment may be something stamped into me.
I still worry about grades and rankings, just as I did in high school. A low rank makes me anxious; a high one reassures me. My mood swings with the leaderboard.
I don't like it. I don't like this mindset, and I like even less that exam-driven education still has such a hold on me.
Maybe I never stopped thinking like a small-town exam grinder, because I really did come from a small county town, longing for the world outside. There's this mistaken belief, or mental imprint, that in my world, falling behind means losing my chance to escape into a bigger one.
I want so badly to tell myself that it doesn't work that way anymore. But the imprint remains. And so university acquires another layer of disappointment, one I've coated it with myself.
Maybe that coating will only begin to dissolve once I actually step into the bigger world.