A sudden burst of inspiration, serving as a summary of my academic year.

First, let me quote a passage from the Survival Manual for SJTU:

Dear students, at the beginning of this book, I have the unfortunate task of informing you of a piece of news. Undergraduate teaching in the vast majority of domestic universities is not on the verge of collapse; it has already collapsed. Here, I have no intention of arguing whether Fudan, USTC, Tsinghua, or Peking University have collapsed slightly less than we have—such a debate is meaningless. I simply see countless students, full of curiosity, passion, and youthful dreams, who are about to hand over four years of their youth to the university to be shaped, filled with hope and trust. This makes me feel very uneasy.

In fact, I feel very fortunate. My luck has been decent, and my information retrieval skills are acceptable. Right after the Gaokao (National College Entrance Exam) ended, I came across the Survival Manual for SJTU . Not long after I began studying CS, I discovered csdiy . Although I am not at my dream university (having underperformed in the Gaokao), it is at least the major I chose for myself—a major I have enough passion and interest in to fully commit to.

When I first entered university, I asked some outstanding seniors about their reasons for choosing the CS major. The answers I received, however, were often pragmatic considerations such as “this major has potential” or “it makes good money.” I couldn’t help but wonder how many people truly harbor clear goals and dreams during these precious four years. What do they fervently pursue? What achievements do they long to reach? What kind of future will they shape? Yet, as I type these words, the sounds reaching my ears are still the clamor of my roommates immersed in video games. I do not claim to be sober or superior; I simply feel that wasting youth in such a manner is a profound pity and truly regrettable.

For someone like me who has loved “tinkering” since childhood, it might not be surprising that I’m interested in CS. Unfortunately, due to equipment limitations, my understanding of CS was actually very, very superficial. I didn’t understand the command line, I didn’t understand programming languages, and I didn’t understand networking. Essentially, I was a complete novice who knew nothing. Perhaps using a few plugins, knowing a few software titles, or messing around with the Windows system—these simple things even to make me believe I understood computers very well. Looking back now, it is quite embarrassing. Regardless, to figure these things out, I learned how to search and got used to checking documentation, which was a good start after all.

The Gaokao is, after all, a periodic selection method. No selection method can be all-encompassing enough to help universities admit exactly the students they want most. Since almost all primary and secondary education serves the Gaokao selection process (excluding those attending undergraduate programs abroad), many students have subconsciously formed a linear thinking mode. In university, there will be GPA evaluation standards, but the university no longer relies on grades as the sole dimension to linearly judge a person’s excellence, as the Gaokao does. Upon graduation, your development will have little to do with your initial Gaokao score. In those four years, countless opportunities will await your grasp, and they will greatly influence the direction of your future life. After entering society, you will find that although statistically the better the university, the higher the achievements, the variance in the paths of graduates from any single school will be larger than you can imagine.

However, what is even more disheartening is that the number of classmates around me willing to put in the effort to “grind” is already small. Among this minority, those who can avoid being held hostage by GPA and truly work for the sake of knowledge itself are few and far between. As the author said, undergraduate education in universities has already collapsed. Based on my personal experience with the courses offered by my school, I can say that only the C Programming course can be considered somewhat useful. Even so, it is far from enough to serve as a cornerstone for a career in the industry. As for the remaining courses, you don’t even know the point of them being offered.

In our school, C language has a proper OJ …

“What do you want to do?” — This question has frequently lingered in my mind since the Gaokao. When I first enrolled, I was very lost. The expectations of my family and the disorientation of a new environment caused me to lose my direction. During the winter break, I finally figured it out: you cannot “grasp all and win all.” Obsessing over GPA was never my intention, nor was indulging in comfort and wasting time. To the point that I feel some regret—why didn’t I start the path of self-study earlier? Why did I still follow the school’s curriculum step-by-step? Some matters are still dragging down my pace even now.

Whatever we do, we need to give ourselves a reason. Being busy every day without any original ideas, forced by the pressures of life, can be called one of life’s great tragedies.

When stepping through the university gates, the biggest question we face is: Why attend class? Perhaps because the question itself is too obvious, we are even too lazy to think about it. But who among us has truly and effectively thought about this question?

“Fearing the teacher’s roll call,” “to copy notes and homework,” “to record exam highlights”… these statements, at best, are excuses for being forced to attend class, but they cannot be the reasons we attend class out of conviction.

The only thing that can truly become a reason for us to attend class is our thirst for scientific and cultural knowledge.

If whether you attend class has little impact on your exam results; if the knowledge we are interested in is not on the school’s timetable; if the effect of learning in class is poor enough and the efficiency low enough that through self-study, you can master the knowledge in a shorter time; then do you still need to go to class?

Despite the current situation, I still see people online whose views align with mine, meet many admired seniors, and find predecessors who have distilled their journeys into experience, building platforms for us to learn from.

Please remember, there are always things more worth doing. Please keep your sights on the long term. Do not attend class for the sake of GPA. Think independently about whether attending class, studying, and exams are truly worth doing, and whether day after day of exercise problems is truly necessary to execute. The reason we refuse to learn knowledge that is not particularly useful to us is that the value of that knowledge to us is too low.

Never expect the school to personally arrange a broad and smooth road for you. The true path must ultimately be carved out by yourself, one step at a time.

Learning is not necessarily painful, but learning without pain, or learning without the feeling of joy, yields no gain.

Finally, I will quote a passage from csdiy as a closing remark:

You must have enough drive to force yourself to calm down, read dozens of pages of Project Handouts, understand code frameworks with thousands of lines, and endure hours of debugging time. And all of this comes with no credits, no GPA, no teachers, and no classmates—only one belief: you are becoming stronger.

P.S. The English text above was translated by a Large Language Model without manual proofreading. Please excuse any unnatural phrasing or slight losses in the original emotional nuance.