It’s All About The Experience

On My Graduation

Time flies, right?
When we talk about COVID-19, we speak in past tense – everything feels so distant yet so real.
The Class of 2024 experienced the first, and hopefully the last, delayed Gaokao.
Online learning and campus lockdown did take away some fun from our expected university life,
but they also gave us shared memories unique to our generation.

What an experience.

Now we can confidently say that we’ve made it through this great difficulty. Whoa.

Being on the International Campus is already a rare experience.

Indeed, when we chose the ZJU-UIUC Institute on our will after turning adults,
we chose a university life different from the majority.

• You won’t find such a beautiful campus everywhere,
• you won’t find dual degree programs everywhere,
• and you won’t find top-tier engineering curricula everywhere.

We are blessed to have the opportunity to receive joint education from the top universities
in China and the US, and therefore I’d like to express my gratitude to the professors who
led me into the world of academia and opened the door to the promising field of engineering.

And then there are extracurricular experiences.

During the social practice in my first summer vacation, our team traveled to Jingdong, Yunnan
to experience a life different from what we were familiar with.

• We taught the primary school students what our life was like,
  and they taught us what people in the Chinese rural area were like.
• We researched the local food industry and tried to make a difference
  by selling the products in online streaming.

We always hear news about how underdeveloped these areas are, but it was not until we experienced the lifestyle ourselves that we had a deeper understanding of the reality.

My 20th birthday in August 2022 marked the most precious experience
in my undergraduate years.

During our exchange to UIUC, we managed to live on our own in another country.

• We made budgets and solved all kinds of difficulties.
• We met professors and formed teams with students of all ethnic groups.
• We chose from a great variety of courses.

I loved the vibe of the small town of Urbana-Champaign – it’s quiet, harmonious, and filled with possibilities. When I connected with people and paved my own path of professional development,
I truly felt like an adult.

---

What an experience. And there is more to come.

We are in the middle of a technological revolution greater than ever before.

• Scripting languages like Python have lowered the bar of AI training and inferencing
  for everyone with a sufficient GPU.
• Writers, illustrators, and composers are anxious about losing their jobs to ChatGPT,
  Stable Diffusion, and Suno.
• Tesla is aggressive about achieving fully automated driving.
• The brain-machine interface has made its debut outside of science fiction.

The world is filled with things we never thought were possible just half a decade ago.

There have been, and there will be, countless times when we feel uneasy
amidst these rapid changes and countless directions.

• We all have something we want to escape from, and other things we want to embrace.
• We wonder where the train of life will take us, without knowing what lies in the rail ahead.
• We doubt if we have any control over the unknown turbulence, or if we’re just a tiny jellyfish floating with the wave, mixed within the crowds.

Well, turns out that we do have control.
Small as the jellyfish, it can still illuminate after absorbing light from the surroundings.
Plain as our lives may initially be, we can always make a difference after broadening our horizon.

Experience more, and even more.

Read all kinds of books. Learn from all disciplines.
Meet people of all backgrounds around the globe.
Embrace the vast diversity from all walks of life.

The idea of being open and inclusive strikes especially hard in the modern era.

• The world is never peaceful.
• Great powers are trying to separate us apart.
• The Internet, in some instances, is widening the information gap and giving birth to conflict.

Diverse experience is especially beneficial for understanding the situation of others before we develop technology that will benefit humanity, and develop our personality and world outlook
along the path.

We tried so hard, we got so far, and in the end, all of these matters.

It’s our unique experiences that lead to unique individuals. The world is in front of us, and there are issues waiting to be solved by nobody other than ourselves, the rising generation of China.

It’s gonna be hard.
It’s gonna be worth the effort.
And it’s gonna be fun.

Go for it, and wish us all the best!

Ziyuan Chen

May 2024

---

Let it be code or music, do it like you never did before.