Chapter 37 Part Four: Farewell to Cambridge Exams in Cambridge

At 12:45 in the night, I drank three cups of Blue Mountain coffee, and the black liquid flowed in my body, and the effect was magnificent and powerful.I feel that I am full of energy and sharp thinking, and continue to bend down in front of the computer to revise the final draft of the thesis.The pink timely stickers next to the laptop marked the deadline of each essay with colorful highlighters.People who are born in journalism are always very sensitive to the word "deadline". When I was a student reporter, I was often locked up in the small office of the editorial department by the old editor the day before the deadline and forced to crawl through the grid. Sometimes, "out of place", but also bite the bullet and write.The word deadline in English is still wonderful: the death line - if you reach this line and don't finish the work, prepare to die.I'm dying on this line right now with three deliveries due next week.I thought that these three cups of coffee could last for an hour, but I didn't expect that after less than an hour, I started to wilt again, yawning one after another.On the desk is a pile of economics books brought back from the library, piled up high, as if it might collapse at any time.The theories and works of Adam Smith, Keynes, and Marshall lightly suppressed my sleepy and wrinkled thoughts, but they could not be subdued. Instead, they rubbed against each other, making my mind wrinkle more violently.From then on, I just kept running between the desk and the bed.At dawn, when the birds twittered, I fell asleep on the table with Schumpeter in my arms. It was really embarrassing.

Since I was a child, I have been a bad character of "no tears without seeing the coffin".Usually I don’t study hard enough, so when others are preparing for the exam, I have to combine preview, study, review, and exam into one.In a trance, I thought of the scene when I was in college and ran to the corridor to review my homework with a fan and mosquito repellent.At that time we lived in the old dormitory in the East District of Fudan. During the exam, there were people sitting in the corridors, on the corner of the stairs, in the water room and in the toilet.Girls who looked like flowers and jade sat desolately under the 25-watt electric lamp, endorsing books in pain.The girls' heads were lowered, and the hair on both sides fell on the books, covering the whole face, looking scary like a ghost.If you usually play happily, if you don't hold your feet before the exam, isn't it self-defeating?

I am not the only one who is in pain. What is more troublesome than me is the Chinese Ph.D. who lives across the street. He can't write a thesis, but he cooks a pot of Shiquan Dabu Chicken Soup and asks me to nourish his brain together.He complained, "I can't find my wife even after I got a Ph.D., because the so-called PhD is the abbreviation of Permanent Head Damage." I can't get married for a lifetime, as the American female poet said-Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses (men never flirt with women who wear glasses).The two of us were so happy that the chicken soup almost gushed out.

Ann, the tutor of the college, sent me an email to ask me to meet her. It turned out that it was to give me psychological counseling before the exam.Not long ago, a student newspaper in Cambridge made a survey and found that more than 20% of the students have mental or psychological diseases, especially at the end of each semester, the intense academic pressure makes many students have to seek help to a psychiatrist.Due to the high pressure of studying, the suicide rate of students has been quite high in recent years, so the college pays great attention to understanding the psychological trends of students and reducing pressure in time. "You are the twelfth student I met this week, and the only one who didn't complain to me." After carefully understanding my daily life, she had an incredible expression.I laughed: If you don’t complain, it doesn’t mean you don’t suffer.Yes, I am afraid that there are no students who study here who do not work hard.Of course, most Chinese students are still mentally strong. After all, they have experienced the baptism of countless exams in China since they were young, and they have been tempered.I know a girl from Beijing who is studying for an MBA here. After she came here, she kept losing weight, so much so that when her husband came to visit her relatives a few days ago, she almost didn’t dare to recognize her, “Want to lose weight, come to Cambridge! ’ She often repeats this sentence like a commercial.Yang Guang, who lives under the same roof as me, often said puzzledly: "What's the matter, I feel that my body is always losing heat, and I always feel hungry." Yes, everyone is busy now, and I often meet him. The place is the kitchen, and the meeting is just a word: Yo, eat again!He was always grilling sausages, the fat and oily stuff he could eat three or four at a time, several times a day.Even so, the speed at which he lost weight was really frightening. A pair of jeans that used to look tight on him now looked baggy and bulky.Less than a year after arriving in Cambridge, he lost nearly 20 catties.Everyone in our house has found the best energy food for themselves: Roman always buys a turkey that grows to be huge, cooks it and tears the meat into pieces and puts them in plastic jars for snacks; Simon loves Eat steak, the kind with bloodshot eyes.I am relatively simple, I drink yogurt when I am hungry.

A former student of mine wrote to me after reading my electronic diary on the Internet, and asked me worriedly if I have more ambitions besides food and beautiful clothes, which are two pursuits that almost every woman has. pursuit.I was happy at first, and then I realized that most of my words were indeed talking about the scenery of Cambridge, the food in England and my happy life.No wonder she was questioning.In fact, as long as it is really studying, there is no hard work.The natural environment in Cambridge is really warm, and you don’t want to get up when you lie on the grass, but how many people can lie leisurely forever?Compared with domestic universities, the teaching time of Cambridge University is actually very short.There are three semesters in a year, and each semester has only eight weeks.However, during these eight weeks, the course schedule is very tight, and the teaching volume is very large.The number of courses here is actually not many, but each course consists of more than a dozen lectures, and the content span is really large, from the famine and AIDS in Africa to the financial reform strategy of multinational enterprises.Before each lecture, the professor will issue a long reading list (book list, the books are as heavy as bricks), and will torture us with essays (small essays) or presentations (classroom presentations) at every turn.The teacher's class is very fast. Basically, he only talks about the key points without giving specific and in-depth explanations. If you want to understand a topic thoroughly, you have to take a bunch of books from the library and go back to read.The British believe that learning is their own business. No one will force you to finish reading any book. Learning depends entirely on self-consciousness.On the one hand, it is hard to study hard at ordinary times. In addition, we also have the pressure to get a degree—if we don’t study hard, we may not be able to graduate.On weekends, there are always groups of students dancing and drinking in the small streets of Cambridge. However, on Mondays, all the hustle and bustle subsides. The turnover of the town's pubs is also estimated to be plummeting.Therefore, the most thrilling dance in each semester is the end-of-semester dance after the exam—all youth and madness are vented on that night.We sometimes envy the visiting scholars in Cambridge. They are free to choose courses in any department and do not need to take exams. , but it is also "trembling, as if facing an abyss".In order to calm the nervousness of the students, the department invited a senior sister who graduated from our major and worked in the United Nations to communicate with you. When talking about the exam, she comforted us in a joking tone and said: "The Distinction (excellent) in the Cambridge exam is It’s hard, but it’s even harder if you don’t want to graduate.” The teacher said empathetically: We will try our best not to let you fail. If you fail, that’s not your fault, but ours. I will try my best not to let you 'pawn', if you are unfortunately sacrificed, it is not your fault, but ours).Yes, Cambridge is confident. She believes that her students are the best, so there is no need to worry about students wasting their time, and there is no need to doubt their abilities.But history proves that they have made this kind of mistake occasionally. A certain noble Thai princess once "sacrificed" here. No one wants or dares to let the teachers make mistakes again, otherwise it will be like the song - wrong You are the one who hurt, but I am the one who is hurt.

I majored in economics at Cambridge. Many people mistakenly thought that I was a good young man with great ideals, so I dared to change my major and study economics at Cambridge. In fact, my choice at the time was not a rational plan at all, it was more or less a whim impulse.It's just that Cambridge's tolerance fulfilled my impulse.At the beginning, I was really uncomfortable. It was all thinking about the current situation of the macro-theory of national economic development, which was far from my past life.After living in a city like Shanghai for a long time, I am more or less used to living in my own small world, romantic and petty bourgeoisie, I can take whatever I want and do whatever I want.I think I am chic, but I let my perspective of thinking become narrower and narrower.Now that I think about it, I made the right choice for this major. Although it is interdisciplinary, the pain of lack of knowledge structure made me struggle at first.But now I slowly feel that my vision is broadening, and my thinking about social economy and politics is deepening.More importantly, come out of your own little world.Development studies is a comprehensive discipline involving economics, institutions, sociology, and political science, so it spans a wide range of disciplines.From a horizontal perspective, it requires students to understand the economic and political status quo of some major developed and developing countries; from a vertical perspective, it emphasizes the use of historical comparison methods to explore the development paths of different types of countries.My harvest is very big, but not mainly in knowledge.First of all, in terms of thinking, I used to focus on things that are more delicate and microscopic, but the macroscopic nature of this subject has allowed me to broaden my horizons, and I have a feeling of "breathing my chest and forming stratus clouds"; secondly, I am doing In terms of academic methods, especially the method of historical analysis, I have learned not to regard a system or phenomenon as an isolated thing, but to pay attention to observing and understanding the inextricable connections before and after the changes of things.One is the cause of what happened to him, and the other is the effect of what happened to him.The application of this method, on the one hand, is very loyal and forgiving, because it can point out the historical background of a system or theory, and can also understand its position and value in history, without excessive criticism.But on the other hand, this method is the most severe, because it always judges the value of a theory or system by its results.

If you switch to another major completely, you will gain a lot during the usual study, but you will face difficulties before the exam.The course of development economics covers too much content, and the knowledge points are complicated. It is not efficient to "snap it" alone, so I review it with Ping.The two of us first dated those brilliant economists in books, and then we got together to drag these masters out of the grave one by one, praise or curse, so as to deepen the memory.Ping's eyes were red and swollen, and she knew it was the result of lack of sleep. She was really serious, and she organized each topic into a few pages of text for memorization before the exam.She said to me: "Girl, I have been away from school for ten years. I have never worked so hard for the exam when I was a graduate student in China." The training course is just a formality, and there is no strict examination requirement. The students intend to go abroad to "golden", and the school intends to generate income.But it is not easy to plate gold in Cambridge. No matter your background is a government official or a royal relative, before the exam, "all beings are equal".

In the past, I heard some people in China advocate the theory of "examinations are useless", saying that foreign education systems are advanced, and the so-called "quality education" means that students only study and do not take exams, or that universities do not pay attention to students' test scores at all.It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I realized that this was nonsense.Here students not only have to take various exams, but also publish their scores.At the end of the big exam every year, the school will score according to certain rules according to the scores of the students of each college, and queue up the colleges to promote mutual competition among colleges.Of course, this is not "one test determines life". The grades obtained by students when they graduate finally are the comprehensive evaluation of multiple exams and papers. final result.Cambridge’s charter clearly stipulates that if a student wants to continue his studies in the school after graduation, his grades must be excellent. Generally speaking, undergraduates must achieve Second Class A, and postgraduates must achieve High Pass, which is almost equivalent to full The top 30% of the department.Not only the school, but also the companies that come to Cambridge for recruitment also value the performance of students.Wang Jie, a girl from the same college as me, is from Guangzhou and is an undergraduate student in the Department of Economics.She was admitted to the London branch of PricewaterhouseCoopers not long ago after a series of written tests and interviews, but what she got was only a conditional offer (conditional employment), and the company's condition is: your graduation score It must be ranked in the top 30% of the whole department, otherwise it will not be hired.

For me, the significance of the exam does not lie in its form itself: for any exam, the rationality of the content needs to be continuously improved.It is unrealistic to expect the test to fully reflect the comprehensive quality of a student.But I have to admit that the exam is still a good thing.Not only does it force us to overcome inertia and comprehensively sort out the knowledge we have learned, but more importantly, in the process of preparing for the exam, we can cultivate the spirit of concentration and dedication and the ability to endure some necessary hardships. Relaxation seems to be the state pursued by our generation, and there is a natural disdain for hardship and hard work.I once watched a TV talk show in China that interviewed the champions of the college entrance examination. It was very strange that several champions emphasized that they usually play a lot and how relaxed they are before the exam, while deliberately avoiding or downplaying that they are preparing for the college entrance examination. The hardships and difficulties experienced in the process.That's right, you may not be able to read a good book if you work hard, but if you want to read a good book, you must work hard. Are our champions all geniuses with superhuman endowments?Once, when someone praised me as a hardworking student, I was so uneasy, as if hardworking meant stupidity, I hurriedly argued that no, I was learning while playing, for fear that others would think we were nerds (nerds) ).We hug each other before the exam, and we can feel at ease when we get a good score: Look, small investment and big output.This is how they often mistake small cleverness for great wisdom, ignoring the accumulation of knowledge and the development of thought.Relaxation is a good state of mind, but it may not always be a good state of life. People need to have some heavy things.

Hard work is not necessarily unhappy, on the contrary, a bit of pride will be born in the process of overcoming pressure.I'm thankful that no matter how busy I am, I can still enjoy the many little things in life.Sometimes I feel that, in fact, everyone is facing many similar contradictions and confusions. Why do some people feel sad all day long, while others can take things lightly?Because the human mind is like a weight, and everyone puts the weight in different places.I study hard, because I believe that only when I am rich can I help more people; I also treat my life well, because I know that when I am happy, I can infect more people.Ideals and pursuits are the coordinates of life, and the fine details of life are the details of life. Perhaps their unity is the essence of life.

At the end of the chat, Ann told me that in a few weeks, there will be a small snow-white flower on the lawn in Cambridge called: snowdrop. When the flower blooms, spring will come.I don't know why, her words made my heart full of longing and joy.