I Can't Believe I Missed the Official Graduate Entrance Exam Registration

#Essays

I’d imagined countless ways to fail, but I never thought I’d stumble at this particular hurdle.

What surprised me even more, though, was that I wasn’t sad at all. In fact, I felt a little happy.

This was the taste of true freedom, a feeling I hadn’t known since escaping the confines of university.

My First Attempt: Zhejiang University Computer Science

Around this time last year, I had just completed a two-month long-distance running regimen, averaging 5 kilometers a day. It was an attempt to explore my own limits.

Before and for about half a month after that, I’d still comfortably study for 6-7 hours each day, then run, or just chill out. During this period, I even had the energy to brainstorm creative ways to mark the 100-day countdown to the graduate entrance exam, updating it daily on the whiteboard in my dorm room.

With just over 40 days left, I started feeling time slipping away. I’d only gone through my specialized subjects once, some chapters not at all; I was only halfway through linear algebra, hadn’t even touched probability theory, and hadn’t started on past papers. For politics, I’d only done the 1000-question practice set once and barely looked at the essay questions.

With only a month to go, I, who had never panicked before any exam in my life, finally started to feel the pressure. I knew there was no way I’d have time for a second pass.

Three weeks out, my mind went completely blank. It felt like all the studying I’d done had left no trace, and the thought of giving up flickered through my mind.

After some deliberation, I decided to put up a fight anyway.

The extremely tight timeline and my abysmal study condition became a trigger. It was as if they broke through a barrier, putting me into a “flow state.” As someone self-diagnosed with ADD, it was the first time I truly experienced what deep focus felt like.

The Inevitable Failure

Results

Mathematics I

I hadn’t even finished a full pass of the entire Mathematics I textbook. To top it off, that year’s Math I exam was unexpectedly the most difficult in recent memory. I wrote down everything I possibly could. Target: Whatever happens, happens.

Result: Mathematics I - 90 / 150 points.

Politics

For the politics essay questions, I spent four evenings and one afternoon memorizing the “Xiao Si” (a popular study guide). I used a combination of conceptual understanding and character-splitting mnemonic techniques to condense hundreds of characters of answers into about 40 key characters, memorizing roughly seven or eight questions. During the exam, with many answers hinted at in the questions themselves, I wrote non-stop for three hours. Target: 65 Result: Politics - 70 / 100 points.

English I

I did the English past paper reading comprehension twice, constantly forgetting core vocabulary after memorizing it. During the exam, I nearly fell asleep while doing the reading section. I had memorized essay templates, but in the exam hall, I let loose and started improvising freely. Target: 70 Result: English I - 68 / 100 points.

Specialized Subjects

For specialized subjects, I hadn’t reviewed data structures and algorithms at all, nor two major chapters of computer organization. I’d only gone through the “Wang Dao” (another study guide) once. The 15-point algorithm question on the exam was a complete zero. Target: Whatever happens, happens. Result: 408 Specialized Subjects - 106 / 150 points.

Total Score: 334 Interview Cut-off: 361 Applicants for this Major: Approximately 2000

Cause Analysis

The failure, of course, was inevitable. Here’s my self-analysis of the reasons.

Objective Reasons:

Subjective Reasons:

Recounting the minute details of last year’s exam, beyond a mere recollection, I also want to convey this:

Graduate School Isn’t That Hard to Get Into

My Decision for a Second Try

After all, I was switching fields, starting from scratch with the four core computer science subjects, and my entire first preparation was far too relaxed. So, I told myself, with a little more time, a second attempt would surely be successful.

My official preparation for the second attempt still began in July. It was still a relaxed approach, but this time, it was a grounded, relaxed approach. X words omitted here.

Suddenly Realizing I Missed the Official Registration

My first reaction was surprise. I’m not sure why, but this year I hadn’t set a calendar reminder like I did last year. In any case, after a few minutes of accepting the irreversible fact, I simultaneously broke the news to friends and re-evaluated why I wanted to pursue graduate studies in the first place.

There were primarily two main reasons, which I now refute one by one:

  1. Easier Career Transition Pursuing a master’s degree could allow me to quickly enter a completely new field.

Rebuttal:

  1. Academic Advancement Having a 985 master’s degree is always a good thing, and it can also prove one’s capabilities.

Rebuttal:

Once I had thought it all through, a wave of relief washed over me.

That night, I couldn’t sleep a wink. The thought of finally diving into the books that had piled up on my Kindle for months, meticulously tending to my blog, indulging in photography, bringing recent project inspirations to life, and thoroughly studying all those computer-related blog articles I’d saved for ages – all these possibilities made a quiet joy blossom within me, little by little.

Yes, it was the taste of freedom, freedom in its truest sense.

Freedom and Happiness

What I pursue in life can be summarized into two core tenets: 1. Freedom, and 2. Happiness. These two points serve as my measuring stick for deciding whether to do anything.

When I initially studied physics, it was because I believed it would help me better understand the world I live in, to grasp why everything operates the way it does. Physics, after all, is the “logic of all things.” This represented intellectual freedom.

Now I study computer science because I see it as a universal tool that can be combined with any field, capable of creating tangible, useful “things” – tools that bring convenience to myself and others, genuinely improving the quality of life. The internet, a window to the world, allows us to see a broader perspective. This is freedom of “action.”

Freedom and happiness are interdependent, fostering and diminishing each other. For me, happiness without freedom isn’t true happiness, and freedom without happiness simply doesn’t exist.

It’s strange, but this has happened several times before: though I often contend with gloom and darkness in my daily life, at crucial junctures, the future I envision is always bright and promising. Perhaps I genuinely possess a “gene for optimism.”

Do I feel regret? A little, perhaps. After all, my first round of overall review was largely complete; I was one and a half rounds into math, and past papers were consistently scoring 130+. I hadn’t touched politics in a year, and when I started the 1000-question practice set, I averaged 30 mistakes out of 100 multiple-choice questions, mostly in sections requiring pure rote memorization with no logical reasoning. I had also finished the PAT algorithm problem set by August. And all this with 50 days still remaining until the exam.

Was all that time wasted? Not at all. I strongly dislike spending time on things I consider useless. The parts I actually dedicated time and effort to reviewing will, more or less, be used in my future studies and work: advanced mathematics, linear algebra, and probability theory are all theoretical foundations for data science and machine learning; the algorithm problems I practiced are essential for daily work; and having finished the four core specialized subjects, my foundational knowledge has reached the level of an undergraduate computer science major. Other truly useless things, like politics, I didn’t even bother starting. Plus, during this period, I used my free time to do part-time work and earned nine thousand yuan to buy a camera. Not a loss at all.

Of course, you might see all of this as nothing more than my post-failure self-consolation. But so what? What you think has no bearing on me; I’m doing just fine regardless.

I just read an article with a line at the end that resonated deeply with me:

{% centerquote %} Be kind to yourself. You won’t die if you don’t graduate at 18, so what if you don’t get your Ph.D. in your twenties, what if you’re not a millionaire by a certain age? Go discover the world, understand yourself, and enjoy the process of life. {% endcenterquote %}

You never know what tomorrow holds, and I certainly never imagined I’d miss a major exam one day.

That day, I read a review on natural language processing, followed tutorials to learn web scraping for encyclopedia entries, dug out my blog to write new posts. In short, once my computer was open, I lost all desire to pick up my phone.

I used to always feel that life was short, but at this very moment, for the first time, I feel that life is long. I’m only 22 years old; there’s still so much good time ahead.

{% centerquote %} A setback may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. {% endcenterquote %}