The End of My Freshman Year

Standing at the myrtle beach today, I began to reflect on my Freshman journey.

I feel very blessed and fortuated enough to have what I have seen, experienced, and learned from this school year. I never thought my first year in college would be as good as it went through. I was questioning about fate and believed everything is in my control if I worked hard enough. It is just not the truth after experiencing and contemplating on all the things that happened to me.

I am grateful for my fate. I only had in total a month of online school classes since the covid began. When the virus hitting US, I had come back to normal school mood back in China. As now the virus explodes in China, I have come to US for studying. I still hate Zoom and cannot imagine how my friends went through even all-year-long online courses. I feel like everything in my life is finely presetted so I could have the best outcome as possible. In this sense, I believe myself as a special person as I am certainly being blessed by someone or something that I do not think others have in the same way as I have.

I am grateful for people around me. I know I have already said this over and over again, but I do genuienly feel this way. Opporuntities, happinesses and thoughts I have, those are all brought by someone else than me. I have met so many talented, passionate, unique and interesting people at Duke that makes me feel previliged to talk to them. I woudld like to list them all but I could not since the list would be super long. It is amazing that how many people have helped me and together shaped me into the person I am today.

Looking back at the entire school year, there are also countless highlight moments for me. A random dinner with friends, a road-trip, a makenew Friday, whatsoever… But it never is how I grinded out an exam or what is my quiz score on certain tests. I believe, at least for me, grades is the least important thing among all those important things. As long as I have no regrets to myself, I do not think I should put more time on grades. But also, classes are more important than grades as I always tried to do an interesting but harder question rather than easy but boring one. I did that on my phiolosophy final and I felt so good about it that I do not care about the grade anymore as I have spoken what I would like to say and to learn what I want to learn.

The life is full of adventures ahead waiting for me. Life is fantastic and just best of the best. I kind of understand why 生命 and 生活 are both life in English—因为我像爱生命一样爱我的生活，爱生活一样爱着我的生命。