The First Post

On a whim, in the middle of the night, I opened a senior student's blog and wondered whether I could write one too... Then I started following a tutorial, just like that.

Someone might ask why, at three in the morning, I suddenly decided to write a blog and build a website... All I can say is, sometimes people get that bored. Sitting alone in an all-night study room, unable to sleep because of where you are, you end up doing things that have “no meaning” right now...

Why not revise for finals, someone might ask? Finals week is next week, with so many exams... Honestly, I'm just not interested in spending my time on revision anymore. My final year of high school taught me this: even with teachers taking us through round one, round two, round three of revision, I always ended up in the same place. If I knew the material, I could answer the questions. If I didn't, I mostly couldn't. All the more so at university... Pay attention in advanced maths—I listen a little more carefully in that class—and I can handle most of the final. But linear algebra is mostly self-taught, and with no real drive on my part, what I've learned is a pile of crap. Not enough to fail, probably, but doing the problems isn't much fun. Round and round, until the interest is gone.

So I started doing something that interested me. I casually opened a blog post by an older HNU information-security student that I'd stumbled across while doing the university CTF: “Why I Want to Create an HNU Information Security Chat Group.” Here's the blog post. Reading it again, I got a lot more out of it.

Take one simple point: he said HNU lacked a strong learning culture around information security. I've felt that firsthand... It's nothing like ACM, with the university training team and Wu Hao as a gold-medal coach setting the tone, and several appearances at the World Finals. For information-security CTFs at HNU, I haven't even heard news of a university team... We're all first-years. HNU's ACM scene looks strong, so everyone's heading that way: practicing algorithms, solving programming problems, doing Codeforces, Nowcoder, and so on... Even in our programming course, several assignments don't look like introductory exercises. They look like algorithm problems pulled out and handed to us. Then the teacher explains them, and it turns out to be material you'd normally see among OI competitors... Ah well. Information security already has a small intake. There are people who just wanted to study computing, or couldn't get into computer science or electrical engineering and were reassigned here... They've all arrived. And then you find that people seem to have... no real picture of information security? I wouldn't call it a lack of interest. Mention cybersecurity and everyone thinks of hackers. Hackers are cool; they're interested. But the people who actually join in, who discuss CTFs together, are so, so few... At a university competition, the event chat had over a hundred people, but only twenty-odd first-years played... People don't want to try because they've never encountered it, never even learned about it. And because they haven't learned about it, they're even more afraid to try. The result is an even quieter, more barren information-security scene...

I'm a little lost. I want to try CTFs because I think they're really interesting... But I don't know where to go next. I'm an information-security student, but first of all, I'm a university student. I have to keep up with my coursework. I can't let anything slip... Beyond that, loneliness is another fog around me. I haven't found many people in my year who share this interest, and I'm afraid to reach out to older students—I admit it's a flaw, but I've been this way since childhood... Nor can I find a teacher I can talk to, someone to guide me. I really am lost... All I can do is keep doing little CTF exercises by myself. Exercises, yes, not training. Sipping at knowledge, little by little...

Sometimes I think: I'm only in my first year, even my first semester. It's normal to be lost about everything. I don't need to pursue things so urgently. What will come will come. But I also think: since I'm a first-year, shouldn't I look properly at what I can do in my first year? Do a little more now and have a little more free time later—though it might be a bottomless pit, hahaha. Then I could spend that free time staring into space, reading stories AI writes, sleeping soundly and playing in dreams, or doing interesting things like this. Little by little, doing things that feel comfortable... Collecting my own small joys.

I'm still looking forward to the future, just as I always have.