Awards

Actually I am not the type of person who is so enthusiastic in awards, but I still encourage my friends and students to try to apply for scholarship and compete for awards as many as they can. Besides acting as an indicator of success, a feedback of our effort and a short term motivation, it is also a good training in our presentation skills and self-selling strategies. These are also important abilities if we want to obtain sufficient funding for research or proposals when we become PhD and professors. Most importantly, we can have a reflection on important questions, including “where our special strengths are” and “what our long term goals are”.

Of course, the system of picking up the prize winners is not always fair or optimized. In Tsinghua University, exam score is the only currency in most cases. They ask for your GPA first no matter you apply for which scholarship or which projects. The priority is just simply ranked according to your rank in exams. Indeed, such inflexible system greatly reduces any argument or dispute, but I feel that it also badly influences students’ values and attitudes towards exams.

So, it is really a great difficulty for Hong Kong and Macau students here to be awarded scholarship. They have no ideas about the rules of the game, and mainland China students have played it for 12 years. Anyway, it is an opportunity to think about what their real strengths are, compared with the “academically very strong” mainland students.

Compared with universities in Hong Kong or foreign countries, the amount of scholarship in Tsinghua is rather low. To me, it’s an encouragement more than financial support. Rather different from some schoolmates, however, my confidence and courage are not built on scores or awards or offers, but originate from the real understanding of my own abilities and personalities. That’s how I survived through the first two years in Tsinghua, even though I ranked last in the whole department

Some awards I got:

1. Huarun Scholarship for Hong Kong students 2005-2008
2. Scholarship of Excellent Academic Performance, 2006,2007
3. Integrated Scholarship for Academic Achievement (top 10% students), 2008
4. Tsinghua Stars of Overcoming Challenges (10 students in whole university), 2008

 Star of Overcoming Challenges

At the night of 31st Dec, 2008, I was awarded the “Star of Overcoming Challenges” in the Great Hall at Tsinghua. Although the prize does not include a scholarship, it symbolizes my effort in overcoming the difficulties I met in the past three years, and my success in doing well academically as a science student. I hope that this honor can serve as an encouragement to other Hong Kong students in Tsinghua who also face a lot of challenges here but still want to become a successful person.

I felt rather silly when the prize winners were asked to sing with the Tsinghua Principal on the stage during New Year countdown.

This is the certificate of the Excellent Academic Performance. The Chinese words in the last paragraph mean, “Wish that you continue to work hard, have an all-rounded development, become a talent and invigorate the Chinese nation.” Really full of “characteristics of China”.

The certificate of another year, with same wordings…

Sometimes the department holds inter-class sports competition for us to play for. Last year we won a first-runner up in the table-tennis contest.
It is also the first time for me to see a totally hand written “certificate”.
Sportsmanship and friendship weigh more in such kind of friendly matches, anyway.

2nd Runner up in inter-departmental bridge tournament

It is the final year in my college. I have devoted most of my time in study and research during the last three years, so it is better for me to grab hold of any opportunities to enjoy some other activities. We were the last team which entered the semi-final. It reminded me of the inter-school bridge competition I took part when I was in Form 6. Being invited to be the Chairman of Bridge Club in my secondary school, I started to learn bridge by myself and finally led my team into quarter final, after defeating 7 teams in one whole day.

Now I’m trying to take part in the bridge training of Tsinghua’s team, and see if I can get the chance to represent the school to play some tournaments. The prerequisite is that I can organize my schedule in an ordered way to make up some extra time for practice.