Today is December 31, 2025. It is 23:57. In three minutes, the new year will arrive.
It is Wednesday. As usual, I ran my last 5K of 2025 in the afternoon, went back to the dorm for a shower, then joined the last meeting of 2025. After everyone on Tencent Meeting said “Happy New Year, let’s keep working hard next year,” I biked to Yushuyuan for my last dinner of 2025: Yushu roast duck rice, 25 RMB.
Maybe this was the first time I hesitated over how to spend New Year’s Eve. I do not think I had ever deliberately thought about it before. Seeing the Peking University lantern fair on Xiaohongshu made me want to go jump into Weiming Lake tonight, but then I realized there would be too many people and the water would be too cold. So I decided thinking about it was enough. I had also given away the Tsinghua New Year’s Eve gala ticket I had picked up a few days ago. So I decided to spend the end of 2025 in the lab. At least I could finish the final numerical methods assignment, since the exam is in five days and I still have not previewed the material.
This year might have been the least stressful year of the past decade, and maybe also the year when I drifted the most. The first half was a semester of senior-year idleness at home with no classes. I played more games during that half year than I had in my first three and a half undergraduate years combined. The games with the most playtime were probably FC23, Pokemon Violet, GTA5, Slay the Spire, and Euro Truck Simulator 2. Back then, apart from my thesis and my advisor’s work, there were only games. Looking back, it does feel like I wasted a lot of time.
The turning point was undergraduate graduation. In May, while preparing for graduation and packing up, I kept thinking that my undergraduate years were just over like that. I miss my four years at Nanjing University so much: Xueyou and McDonald’s downstairs from Building 3, and of course countless days doing chemistry experiments in Area A of the lab building and countless nights writing code in the computer room in Area B. I miss it badly. I really want to restart that undergraduate game once more.
Then, one morning in June, a WeChat call from my advisor brought catastrophic news: my summer vacation had died heroically. By the time I found out, only the residual soul of two weeks of vacation remained. Could it still be saved? Please? So I became a soon-to-be workhorse. In reality, each day was still not very different from vacation, except that one new sports activity was added: I found a wall in the residential compound that was perfect for tennis practice, though the other side of the wall was a lake. At least three of the many tennis balls now sunk in Baijia Lake were mine.
In July, I did one thing that was absolutely right: I organized a reunion for my high school classmates after our undergraduate graduation. Everyone was very happy that night, and I turned joy into sorrow by drinking a whole bottle of red wine and getting drunk for the first time. In August, I did something that might have been right: I got my driver’s license. As someone with red-green color weakness, I thought the hardest part was proving I was not colorblind. If I truly could not tell traffic lights apart, the fact that I had survived this long would be a miracle. But just as automatic transmission replaced manual transmission, and AI-generated code replaced programmers typing code by hand in the old way, what will replace or reconstruct the driver’s license in the future?
September marked the beginning of life in Beijing. New classmates: top students from universities everywhere, plus Tsinghua undergraduates. Everyone is clear-headed, and everyone is strong. New environment: I quickly got familiar with senior labmates and my workstation. New life: for master’s students, coursework is usually not that important. Some people care about internships, some care about papers, and some care about a research ideal that is hard to realize.
Other parts of life, of course, have kept me from being anxious about the future all the time. Tsinghua’s dining halls are ten thousand times better than Nanjing University’s, and Tsinghua’s sports activities quickly fascinated me. Besides those, there is student work and various events. There has also been a string of things that made my emotions feel like a roller coaster. They made me realize that in relationships, I may not be a particularly good person: maybe too intense, maybe too sensitive, maybe too selfish.
In November, I talked for an hour and a half with a senior alumna from the department at the cafe downstairs from the Zhipu building. She should have already started her overseas postdoc life by now. That hour and a half strengthened some of my beliefs, even though I still cannot see where the road leads. Still, “the answer is on the road.”
Sometimes I feel that time is a circle. It seems that every time I begin a new stage of life, my opening is always harder than other people’s. Maybe everyone thinks this way?
2026 is destined to be difficult. Keep going. Carry the dream and run faster.
