I'm a little tired. I had wanted to run a few laps and work up a sweat, but my body is exhausted. Perhaps tonight I should stop trying to “align” myself with the ever-energetic Zhang Xuefeng and sit down to write a few words instead. A walk for the mind, if you like.
Not long ago, I was chatting with some first- and second-year students when, quite naturally, the familiar question came my way: “As someone who's been through it, how do you think we should spend our university years?”
It is a difficult question to answer. In the slower days before AI made such enormous waves, there was still breathing room between technological advances. The paths ahead were relatively clear. You could often follow one steadily for several years, and it was easier to anchor your sense of meaning in a sequence of orderly choices.
But models now develop so quickly that the idea of “seeing the field clearly and choosing the right direction” has almost become a false premise. Sometimes, just as you crouch beside the track to tie your shoelaces, the track itself has already been overturned or disappeared. Learn a little more slowly, and you may find you no longer need to learn it at all. I often think of the old saying about the new waves of the Yangtze pushing the old ones forward. Who knows how soon it will be the first-year students teaching me?
My lowest grade at university was in Engineering Graphics. The course demanded spatial reasoning and drawing skills, which happened to be my two great weaknesses. One suggested way to catch up was to use CAD modeling to help those of us with poor spatial ability understand what we were looking at. The trouble was that I knew nothing about CAD and was not particularly good at learning this kind of software. Worse still, I could not even make sense of the two-dimensional drawings. How was I supposed to build a three-dimensional model from them? In the end, it was entirely thanks to the teacher's kindness that I scraped through and kept my chance of pursuing further study. I am still grateful to Professor L in the School of Mechanical Engineering for giving me a hand. I am also relieved I hadn't preselected Professor Z's class—the “Venomancer”—or I would have been mercilessly finished off back then.
Looking back from 2026, the knot that once had me tearing my hair out seems as fragile as a sheet of paper. When an unfamiliar field feels intimidating, AI agents can offer both knowledge and endless reassurance, without the awkwardness of asking another person for help. As for three-dimensional modeling, you can simply feed the drawings to GPT, connect it to Blender, and have the model generated automatically in a few dozen seconds.
The “hard technical barriers” that once kept me up all night, anxious and losing hair, now amount to seconds of computation. If even these concrete skills can lose their usefulness in an instant, what were all those struggles for? What, exactly, are the younger students sitting in classrooms today learning for? Perhaps it is to hold on to the ability to learn—and to experience that peculiar part of being alive in which you cannot seem to learn something, yet have to keep trying anyway.
Thankfully, university is about more than studying. I ran a great deal during those years. On so many nights when my head felt stuffed with too much information and anxiety about the unknown, I would change my clothes and shoes and rush out into the dark. I would feel the solid jolt of my feet striking the rubber track and listen as my breathing grew rougher. Little by little, sweat would wash away the negative feelings. By the time I stopped, drenched and out of breath, all that remained inside was a pure sense of peace and joy.
For now, at least, that inner peace and joy seem able to remain steady amid the headlong rush of technological change. If I really have an answer to offer those younger students, my limited experience comes down to this: find the peace and joy that are yours.