You Came to University to Regain Your Right to Choose

Back in high school, we always fantasized that once we got into university, life would be easy.

But in reality, university isn't truly free either — instead, there's even more pressure. Because the evaluation criteria have shifted from a single measure — exam scores — to GPA, comprehensive assessments, competitions, research, student activities, and so on.

You may have already felt it, but haven't told anyone — everyone else seems to know what they're doing, and only you don't.

What you need to do in your first year of university is: don't turn yourself into someone with no choices too early.

The “right to choose” here isn't abstract freedom — it's concrete qualifications.

Want to switch majors? You need excellent math grades from your first year. Want graduate school recommendation? You need competition or research results. Want a job? You need enough internships, projects, and skills. Want to change paths? You'd better not be held back by failing grades or health issues.

The logic here is completely different from high school. In high school's ranking system, everyone runs on the same track to see who's faster. In university's choice system, each person accumulates different combinations of qualifications, but every qualification has a hard threshold.

This means two things.

First, you don't need to win on every track. You just need to clear the bar on the track you choose.

Second, and more importantly: In the ranking system, proving yourself is the goal. In the choice system, proving yourself is an illusion. The qualifications you accumulate are what's real.

If you have high expectations for yourself, or if you came to SCUT thinking you “underperformed,” you might be determined to prove yourself in university.

But university standards are hidden, fragmented, and designed by others. The more you want to prove yourself, the easier it is to be led around by evaluation systems others have designed.

Student unions, clubs, all kinds of “outstanding” labels — many are just someone drawing a circle and telling you that jumping inside means you're impressive.

You jump in, and a year later, you realize that nothing you've done can go on your resume.

Many things in university have only one value: making you look busy. Once done, they leave nothing behind — nothing cumulative.

So the question isn't “who should I prove myself to.” The question is delete the word “prove” from your university dictionary.

You don't need to prove anything to anyone. What you need is: at the end of each semester, you have at least one more thing in your hand that no one can take away from you than you did at the start.

So what should you accumulate in your first year?

1. Grades

Don't worship grades, but don't dismiss them either.

First year has heavy course loads and high credit weights. Your first-year average will hardly change for the next four years.

Conversely, if your first-year grades are good enough, you can free up more time later to explore — to do things that may not be immediately useful but are truly important.

2. Information

Public information includes: your program's curriculum, transfer policies, graduate recommendation rules, competition lists, etc. You can find all of this on your own, but many people don't even realize they need to look.

Private information includes: how a certain professor teaches, whether attendance is strictly checked, competition pitfalls, graduate recommendation experiences — this you have to ask senior students. Sometimes a single sentence from them can save you a lot of detours.

Information channels and collection aren't something you put off until “later.”

3. Work (Portfolio)

This is the killer item for your resume. Because what a work brings is insight that only you possess.

Code, articles, projects, competition results, research reports — these don't just show you're “interested”; they tell the world that you've seen something through from start to finish, that you know the details, that you have something no one can take away.

Another advantage of a portfolio is that it doesn't depend on anyone's recognition. You write a piece of code — it's there. You finish an article — it's there. No one needs to stamp it for approval.

4. Body and Mind

The vast majority of university students only have “half a day”: wake up at noon, order some cheap food delivery, play games in the afternoon, watch videos at night, scroll until dawn, then sleep — repeat for four years.

A stable, regular routine is the foundation of any ambition. If your health is poor, lofty ambitions will only drain your battery faster and burn you out.

Maybe after reading all this, you still don't know your direction. That's fine.

What university's first year is truly about: don't let yourself become someone without options too early.

You don't need to prove you belong here. What you need is to earn the initiative for your next choice.

The Most Dangerous Thing About University Is That It Doesn't Stop You From Spiraling

Two months ago, I interviewed a senior. She told me that among the top 4 in comprehensive evaluation, 3 were from her dorm.

I asked how they managed it. She said a lot, but not a single line was “because I have strong willpower.”

I used to think that student divergence wouldn't show until sophomore or junior year. But I later realized that many people had already entered different tracks just two months into freshman year.

This divergence largely doesn't depend on you — it depends on who you sit next to.

Entering university, we go from one extreme to another:

In high school: strict phone controls, tight allowance limits, supervised study, scheduled routines.

In university: complete freedom with phones and computers, relatively more pocket money, no one checking whether you study, and for the first time, massive amounts of unsupervised time.

But our minds aren't mature enough to handle this switch.

When freshmen first arrive, nobody knows how university works, and no one guides us.

But some people choose to figure out the rules on their own — look up the curriculum, consult senior students, sit in the front row of class. Others just wait for the rules to come to them.

Two months in, everyone's routine, information-gathering methods, and time allocation patterns settle in, and from then on, they run on autopilot.

The first two months of freshman year don't decide your entire four years, but they decide your default behavior patterns. Changing later means fighting against inertia.

I asked the senior how she resisted temptations. She said: “We (my roommates) would go to the library to study in the evenings, and during class, all three of us sat in the front row. You feel like you have a partner with you. And then everyone — all four of us in the dorm — worked really, really hard.”

Her so-called self-discipline wasn't about burning willpower — it was being pushed into a positive cycle by a good environment.

Going to the library with roommates every day meant more study time, keeping up with courses, better grades — which raised her own standards and made her want to keep studying.

Many people think you need intrinsic motivation first, then self-discipline. But in reality, the environment generates habits, habits generate positive feedback, and positive feedback grows intrinsic motivation.

Their dorm didn't just produce the 1st, 2nd, and 4th highest comprehensive evaluation scores. There was something more important — the default setting:

After building a solid foundation freshman year, even though roommates in sophomore year weren't as hardworking, you've already formed the habit and developed standards for yourself. Your intrinsic motivation is stronger.

In high school, spiraling is stopped.

If you fail an exam, teachers talk to you, parents push you to work harder — the whole system gives you countless opportunities for intervention.

University doesn't have that.

Feedback in university is delayed. No one stops you. No one tells you that your regular grades are the professor's way of giving you a lifeline. No one reminds you that failing a course means your transfer eligibility disappears. No one pulls you out when you haven't left your dorm in two weeks.

By the time you realize it, your graduate recommendation eligibility is gone, you can't meet the bar for transferring majors, your resume is empty, and you can't hit the brakes.

University doesn't intentionally want you to spiral. It just wasn't designed with mechanisms to stop you from spiraling.

The senior was lucky to have motivated roommates. That's a factor of luck.

In reality, the vast majority — including my own dorm — don't have a strong studying atmosphere.

If your dorm atmosphere isn't great, make the library, study rooms, and labs your second living space. The atmosphere in these places naturally exists. Just go there and do the same thing everyone else is doing.

Leaving your dorm means entering a space where no one knows you. But that moment is the beginning of divergence.

The same goes for your information environment. Curriculum, transfer policies, graduate recommendation rules — you don't need your roommates to tell you these things. You can find them yourself.

Whether public or hidden information, you have to go get it yourself. Don't expect teachers or senior students to chew it up and feed it to you.

Your environment is random. But your choice of environment is not.

In the first two months of freshman year, you're not deciding who you'll become. You're deciding who you'll become with.

The scariest thing about a good environment is that it makes hard work feel normal. The scariest thing about a bad environment is that it makes spiraling feel normal too.

What High School Taught You for 12 Years Is No Longer Important in the AI Era

You just entered university, and you might hear a professor say, “Don't use AI — that's cheating.” Meanwhile, your senior students will tell you, “Don't do it by hand — use AI.”

This isn't about who's right or wrong. It's a rift between two systems. And you have four years to figure out where that rift's boundaries lie.

High school problems are about reasoning with complete information. Given known conditions and what you've learned, you can logically arrive at an answer. If you can't, the problem must be wrong.

What you face in university is judgment with incomplete information:

For example, preparing for finals — others have senior students' notes and past exam papers. You might only have the textbook and PowerPoint slides from review sessions, sitting in the library staring at your computer screen with no idea where to start.

At this point, you have to make judgments with incomplete information: which chapters are key, which ones aren't worth your time, what's the professor's testing style, and what do you do if something you didn't study shows up on the exam.

No one tells you the correct answer. You only find out whether you guessed right when you actually take the exam.

Our known conditions are never sufficient, but we're forced to make judgments under these imperfect conditions and take responsibility for them.

Even AI's answers come with incomplete information. Even with the same input, different phrasings produce different outputs.

The obvious trend now is that everyone is using AI, while schools are cracking down on and banning it.

For schools, they need to assess your ability — AI is a threat. For real-world tasks, they care about output — AI becomes an amplifier.

So the real question is: how do you use AI to build your own judgment?

First, define the problem. Starting from the existing problem, ask a more refined question with more conditions and clearer acceptance criteria — or even reframe the question from a higher dimension.

What AI should do first is help you ask a good question. Rather than generating an answer for you to blindly believe, this step truly tests our judgment.

Take exam review. Telling AI “summarize the key points” is outsourcing the problem. Asking AI “based on the textbook outline and lecture slides, I think chapters 3, 5, and 7 are the key ones, for reasons 1, 2, and 3 — please check if there are any gaps” is defining the problem. The former lets AI judge for you. The latter means you're judging, and AI is fact-checking.

Then, review the results. Don't trust AI's output unconditionally. Even if AI's hallucinations are minimal, the cost of mistakes can be huge.

Two days ago, my professor invited a guest speaker. He first asked how many of us use AI to help with our work — almost everyone raised their hands. Then he asked how many people read every line AI generates — almost no one raised their hands.

Check AI's boundaries and blind spots. Know where AI's capabilities end.

Finally, take responsibility. You submit an AI-generated paper, get caught, receive a zero — you bear the consequences, not AI.

Machines calculate probabilities. Humans bear the consequences.

But throughout this process, AI is always a supplement, never a replacement.

This is especially true for fields that deal more with the real world — like clinical medicine, electrical engineering, chemical engineering. You must first build foundational domain knowledge before talking about AI assistance. Otherwise, you won't even notice when AI is wrong.

As for which model to use — that question often doesn't matter. Many domestic LLMs offer completely free web access, and their APIs are very cheap. There's no need to spend hundreds of dollars subscribing to GPT or Claude right off the bat.

A skilled craftsman doesn't necessarily need the best tools first. Train yourself with free AI first. When you start feeling its limitations, upgrade then. That's not too late either.

I can't say how many people this article will help. Maybe very few will read this far. Maybe even fewer will take action. But if you try — regardless of the outcome — let me know.