I began writing this post because I am standing at a small turning point. This fall, I will leave for the United States to continue my studies. About a month ago, I officially received my bachelor's degree. At such a milestone, it feels natural to look back — not to summarize my undergraduate years neatly, because life rarely permits neat summaries, but to leave behind a record of the days that have now become my past.

Every time I begin writing something like this, I am startled by how quickly time has passed. The story I want to tell already began four years ago.

A Beginning Under COVID-19

I still remember walking through the university gate for the first time. Like many eighteen-year-olds, I arrived carrying a collection of expectations borrowed from films, novels, and my own imagination. After twelve years of examinations, schedules, rankings, and classrooms, university felt like a destination I had been traveling toward for most of my life. I thought I had finally survived the long road of studying and was about to begin some grand new chapter.

I imagined sunlight pouring through classroom windows, sports fields in the afternoon, conversations that drifted late into the evening, and perhaps, somewhere in all of this, the kind of romantic storyline every film seems to insist is an essential part of university life.

Instead, I was still trapped in the shadow of COVID-19.

My high school years had already passed under the shadow of the pandemic, and my first year of university was still shaped by it. The beautiful life I had imagined did not arrive. What arrived was a small dormitory room, three unfamiliar roommates, and a daily routine that felt less like campus life than a long-term experiment in mild imprisonment.

The world outside existed, but most of the time it was separated from me by walls, regulations, and a laptop screen.

For much of that first year, my universe consisted of four beds, four desks, a dim little room, and online lectures playing endlessly from my computer. The campus I had imagined — the sunshine, the classrooms, the sports, the love stories — seemed to belong to someone else's youth. Mine was spent with live-streamed lectures, black text on a screen, and the strange silence of days that felt both crowded and empty.

Looking back now, I do feel that I missed a rare part of youth, something that usually appears only once. But I cannot honestly say that year was only a loss. It was also a peculiar experience, one I doubt I will ever have again. There was something unreal about growing up in a world that seemed to have been paused, as if someone had pressed a button and asked us all to wait inside our rooms until further notice.

It was not the beginning I had hoped for. But it became my beginning all the same.

Learning to Choose My Time

Time moved on in that muddled way. Before I had fully understood my first year, I found myself in my second.

I was released from one prison and transferred into another.

This time, instead of three roommates, there were five. The room was not large, and the six of us were strangers at the beginning. Yet people become familiar surprisingly quickly when they are forced to share a small space, a bathroom schedule, and the same academic suffering.

My new roommates were all very capable students. We often helped one another with coursework and projects, though if I am being completely honest, much of our cooperation involved discussing how to skip classes efficiently and how to survive assignments with the least possible damage.

It sounds irresponsible when written down. At the time, it felt almost practical.

Speaking of skipping class, that is where one of the more interesting stories of my undergraduate life begins.

Before university, I had never skipped a class. Like many students, I had been taught that skipping class was shameful, almost a moral failure. A student should sit in the classroom, listen to the teacher, read the textbook, and follow the rules.

That was how the world worked.

Then one day I came across a story about a literature professor. She told her students that each semester, she allowed them two absences: one to watch the bright moon over a river, and one to see peach blossoms in the mountains.

For some reason, that sentence stayed with me.

Chinese people have always been good at speaking through images. The moon is rarely only the moon; it often carries faith, ideals, distance, longing, or something beautiful that remains slightly out of reach. Peach blossoms, meanwhile, have long been associated with love.

As for peach blossoms, I never held much hope.

It is funny to say, but the university romance that many people consider almost indispensable never came close to me. Perhaps everyone has their own fate. Perhaps this was the best arrangement. At least it saved me from many dramatic conversations I was probably not prepared to handle.

So I turned to the moon.

For the first time, I began questioning something I had never questioned before: whether my time really belonged to me.

Once that thought took root, another quietly followed. I had spent so many years being taught that the classroom was the center of learning. A good student attended lectures, took notes, and followed the prescribed path. But I began to wonder whether learning and attending classes were really the same thing.

I began skipping classes — not in a grand rebellious way, and not because I wanted to waste my time. I simply discovered that sitting in a classroom listening to material I could learn quickly on my own did not always help me very much. If I could understand most of a course in a few focused days, why should all my afternoons disappear into the fixed rhythm of lectures?

At first, this felt almost dangerous. Leaving the classroom felt like stepping off a marked path into grass. But after the first few times, the fear softened. I began to realize that the world outside the classroom was not empty. It was full of tables, windows, coffee cups, books I had chosen for myself, and hours that suddenly belonged to me.

Cafés, Walks, and a Different Kind of Learning

I often went to cafés.

My reason for going was not very original. Many of the engineers and researchers I admired seemed to enjoy working with a laptop open and a cup of coffee beside them, as if this were a necessary ritual of serious thinking. So I began to imitate them, hoping that by copying their habits I might slowly move closer to the kind of person I wanted to become.

There was a café near the East Gate where I occupied the same corner table so often that the staff eventually stopped asking for my order. I kept returning to the same spot, perhaps because routine felt comforting, or perhaps because I simply disliked spending time choosing where to sit.

At first, I did not like coffee. It was bitter and strange, and I drank it more out of intention than enjoyment. Gradually, though, the bitterness became familiar. Somewhere along the way, I stopped going there for the coffee and started going there for the hours.

I became used to working in an open environment, surrounded by voices, footsteps, opening doors, and the quiet movement of people passing through their own lives while I remained absorbed in mine.

There, I studied things that interested me, read books that would never appear on exams, and sometimes opened papers from fields I barely understood, pretending to contemplate serious questions about life. In reality, I was often just deciding what to eat for dinner.

Outside the cafés, the campus was slowly becoming real to me.

I began walking around more often. There was a period when I took exactly the same route across campus every evening. I have no idea why. I simply liked it.

I stepped on autumn leaves along that route, crossed winter snow on the same road, watched cherry blossom petals drift down in spring, and saw traces of summer sunlight stretched across the pavement. The seasons were not only changing in front of me. I was walking through them, again and again, until the same paths became different worlds.

Somewhere between those walks, those cups of coffee, and those books I chose for myself, I began to slow down.

For many years, studying had meant sitting in a classroom, following a teacher, and reading black words printed in textbooks. Now I was trying, clumsily but seriously, to experience something outside that narrow version of life. I did not yet know what those things would give me. I only felt that perhaps they would make my life a little more meaningful.

Finding Robotics

In this half-escape from a fixed academic rhythm and half-search for my own interests, my third year arrived.

It arrived with pressure.

The second and third years were probably the most academically demanding period of my undergraduate life. But thanks to the self-study rhythm I had gradually developed, the pressure became much lighter than I expected. I was surprised to discover that without attending every lecture, I could often learn most of a course in two or three concentrated days.

This discovery was both liberating and slightly alarming. It made me wonder how much time I had been spending not on learning, but on obeying the appearance of learning.

Gradually, I felt that my time should not be entirely consumed by courses arranged by the school. I was not very satisfied with some parts of the undergraduate curriculum. Some courses felt too old, like relics from another century, carried forward out of habit rather than necessity.

Since I was also considering studying in the United States, I began reading more widely, looking for directions that genuinely interested me.

At the beginning, this search had a slightly unrealistic shape. I wanted, in a vague but sincere way, to become a researcher. Or perhaps more accurately, I wanted to become the kind of person people might one day describe as having contributed something, however small, to the world. It sounds a little dramatic when written down, but at that age, many important decisions begin with some mixture of imagination, admiration, and unreasonable hope.

So the cafés gradually became more than places where I stepped away from routine lectures. They became quiet stations in a long search for my own interests. I read papers and survey articles from different fields, followed news about frontier technologies, and tried to understand what kind of problems could keep me curious for a long time. Much of what I read was beyond me. Sometimes I understood only the introduction and conclusion, and sometimes not even those very well. But slowly, certain words began to stay with me.

One of them was intelligence.

I was first drawn to AI because of that word. To me, intelligence suggested something almost magical: an agent that could understand a piece of the world from simple instructions, respond to us, and perhaps even help us act better in that world. At first, I thought of AI mostly as something living inside a computer, speaking to us through text, images, or code. But as I read more about robots that could move, grasp objects, and interact with physical surroundings, a simple thought appeared in my mind.

If AI was an intelligence behind a screen, then robotics could give that intelligence a body.

A robot, unlike a program on a laptop, could touch the world. It could move, grasp, fail, adjust, and try again in physical reality. That idea fascinated me — not because I already understood the field deeply, but because it made intelligence feel less distant. It connected algorithms with tables, tools, objects, rooms, and all the ordinary things around us.

That was how robotics entered my life. Not as a sudden technical decision, but as a continuation of that long, slightly clumsy search for a direction. It was like seeing a door slightly open and wanting to know what was on the other side. So, with the hours saved from my unofficial attendance policy, I learned a little of what I wanted to learn, explored more advanced material, and quietly prepared for the next stage.

Then, in the middle of all this studying and planning, something unexpected happened.

I started exercising.

A younger student with whom I had become close took me to the gym. For months he kept insisting that I looked like someone who would lose a fight against a strong wind. Before that, I had always thought of myself as a kind of scholar. In traditional Chinese imagination, a scholar is usually not the person practicing martial arts. A scholar holds books, not dumbbells. At least, this was the excuse I had been using for years.

But he believed I should strengthen my body, and somehow I listened.

Under his influence, my third year became one of the fullest periods of my life. I studied what I wanted to study, attended more selectively, drank coffee that I had learned to enjoy, and occasionally lifted weights while trying not to look too surprised by their existence.

A Summer of Firsts

Then came the summer after my third year.

Even now, it remains one of the most meaningful periods of my undergraduate life.

I began what I jokingly called an extreme and rather cruel plan: I cut off almost all unnecessary social contact.

I muted nearly every group chat, kept only the necessary channels for important notifications, and stopped initiating social activities that did not truly matter to me. I wanted to know how much of my time was truly mine. I wanted to see whether, by reducing outside noise and removing unnecessary contact, I could save more time for the things I actually wanted to do.

This plan has now lasted for about a year.

To be clear, it did not turn me into a genius hermit. I did not make any astonishing breakthrough or suddenly understand the universe. But I did gain time. I received the offer I had hoped for. I finally read some books I had been meaning to finish. I played games that had been sitting in my collection for far too long. I traveled to places I had never visited. I watched anime that I had wanted to watch when I was younger but had never had the chance to finish.

In a way, that year felt like compensation. I was making up for an earlier version of myself who had not had enough freedom, money, or courage to do the things he wanted. I am glad that this strange plan helped complete a small part of my childhood. It may not have produced any extraordinary achievement, but for my life, it was undoubtedly a success.

That same summer also brought two firsts.

I was fortunate to receive a research internship at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or SAIRI. It was my first internship, and I took it very seriously. For the first time, I came into contact with a workplace. I also entered a field I had never really thought about before: agriculture.

Before that, I had always imagined agriculture simply as farming. After joining the project, I realized how limited that understanding had been. Agriculture could contain so many different technologies, absorbing them as modules and turning them into practical systems. This fresh understanding was important to me, not because it immediately changed my life, but because it reminded me that the world is often larger and more flexible than the words we use to describe it.

Around the same time, robotics also stopped being only a direction I had read about in cafés. After contacting a professor at Rutgers University, I began working remotely as a research intern on a robotics task planning project. Compared with my work at SAIRI, which was more engineering-oriented and closer to practical implementation, this project introduced me to a more theoretical kind of work under the guidance of a doctoral student.

I began to understand a little better how careful research is done: how ideas are shaped, how details matter, how a sentence can be unclear even when the thought behind it feels obvious.

This influence appeared most clearly in my writing. I began paying more attention to whether I had truly expressed myself clearly, and whether a reader could follow the path of my thoughts without getting lost. Those two “first” experiences were important to me. They offered new ways of seeing, and some of the conversations and small details from that period later returned to me when I was organizing my applications.

But more than anything, they remain in my memory as the summer when the world became wider: offices, projects, fields of crops, late-night revisions, messages from collaborators, and the quiet feeling that I had stepped into places I had only imagined before.

The Final Year

After those internships ended, I entered the final chapter of university.

The last year was quieter.

There were not many courses left, so my life became, in a word, hazy. I had more free time than before, and sometimes that freedom made the days feel strangely loose. Still, looking back, it was a good year.

My days were filled with documents, recommendation letters, revised statements, uncertain waiting, and the strange habit of refreshing email inboxes more often than necessary. I sorted through the path I had taken, prepared applications, and eventually received offers from robotics programs. In the end, I chose the University of Michigan.

I like to think of it simply: I will go to that blue school and study things I care about.

There were no especially dramatic stories in that final year. I read some books. I visited places I had not been before. I spent long stretches of time in a state that was not exactly busy and not exactly idle. I gave myself the chance to go somewhere far away, somewhere I had never been.

And then, at the very end, I graduated.

When I look back on my four undergraduate years, I realize that I did not communicate very much with my classmates. Much of the time, I was doing my own things. But I do not regret that. After all, I had already spent twelve years sitting with groups of people in the same positions, in the same classrooms, at the same times, listening to the same teachers.

Was it so terrible to spend a few years doing something a little different?

Even though I did not socialize much, my relationships with the people around me remained peaceful and warm. We had lived together through a strange time, and that itself is not a small thing. There are people I met along the way who helped me, whether in obvious ways or quiet ones. Some sent me course materials before exams. Some shared food with me during lockdown. Some dragged me to the gym when I clearly preferred remaining a fragile intellectual creature. Some simply sat beside me in silence during difficult days. Some may have left influences in my life that I do not yet understand, seeds buried somewhere, waiting to shine on a future day.

And so, I graduated.

Good Luck

This fall, I will go to the United States. It will be an entirely new experience, unknown and exciting. At this moment — about a month after receiving my degree and standing just before the beginning of my master's program — I find myself looking back over sixteen years of study.

Sixteen years.

I can hardly believe I have already studied for that long, and even more unbelievably, I am going to continue.

I am grateful to the version of myself who kept learning, even when he was tired, confused, or sitting in a dormitory that felt like a prison. I also look forward to the version of myself who may one day learn something worthy of all this time.

Looking back, perhaps university was not where I learned the most things. It was where I slowly learned how to choose what deserved my time.

Finally, to all the friends I have met along the way: I am about to leave. Perhaps we will meet again; perhaps we will not. But thank you for leaving such vivid marks on my life.

I will borrow a line from The Truman Show for you:

In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

And to all of you, and to myself:

Good luck.