Previous Tsinghua University graduation speeches

Previous Tsinghua University Graduation Speeches

It’s the graduation season that happens once a year again. The weather is still as lifeless as in previous years, and the sultry weather is still a bit sentimental. people, it’s just that the seniors and sisters who left school have changed their appearance again. The hot sun in the summer makes all kinds of graduates on the campus road as hard and crispy as the steamed buns in the steamer. I was excited and moved to tears at the same time. I cried like a tearful person at the slightest emotion. I completely lost the pride that I should have at the graduation moment.

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Tsinghua University Graduation Speech 1

Tsinghua graduate Zhou Jieren’s speech at the graduation ceremony Speech: Graduates, take your time

Teachers, classmates, parents:

Good afternoon everyone!

Thank you to the college for giving me this time The opportunity allowed me to walk into this classroom on the west floor again three years later, and once again feel the eternal joy, peace and kindness of my natal family, the School of Journalism.

I can completely understand the mood of the junior brothers and sisters in the audience at this moment. They are sentimental, excited, ambitious and high-spirited. Because three years ago, I was just like you, wearing a academic cap and a diploma, happily stepping out of school and rushing into the workplace, looking forward to fulfilling my ambitions and becoming a young talent. But reality doesn't seem to be this way. So today, all the following content is condensed into one sentence for everyone, that is: graduates, take your time.

Let’s start with my own experience.

After graduation, I joined Xinhua News Agency. When I heard the name, it seemed like a good job. Mainstream media and reporters focus on national events every day, interviewing, writing, and editing. Everything is in line with the ideal of a journalist.

However, in the first year of working in the editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency, what was my job? In the duty room of the editor-in-chief, I answered the phone, sent faxes, delivered documents, copied materials, and set up tables. Signing, taking meeting minutes, correcting typos in documents? My working hours are usually from 5 pm to 8 am the next day.

It’s not that these jobs are meaningless and that I can’t learn anything, but that I really want to engage in journalism work that carries moral responsibility and writes wonderful articles. The contrast is too big.

I even thought about quitting. So I went to Teacher Li Bin and expressed my frustration. Teacher Li told me: In fact, there are not many times in life when you can do things. When you can't do things, just be a person and think about life. At the end, he asked again: Don't be anxious, take your time.

Three words, but my subsequent experiences and thoughts told me that the meaning of these three words is really rich.

Some people say that you should become famous early. I don't think so. Career is a marathon. Have you ever seen anyone running away from a marathon? No. Why? Because marathon is all about how to allocate physical strength, patience and wisdom throughout the whole process. The conditions in the initial period and the final results are often very different.

In fact, news is a very impetuous industry. For most practitioners, they frequently switch between different topics every day, struggling to follow changes in public opinion, and scratching the surface of seemingly rich content. This is very similar to the most popular Weibo today: information overload, fragmentation, non-linearity, and lack of logic.

I recently read a book called "Shallow", which says that rapid and shallow reading on the Internet has caused changes in the physiology and anatomy of the human brain. In many cases, these changes are irreversible. In other words, in the Internet age, humans are slowly losing the ability to read deeply and think linearly. We are getting more and more "knowing" faster and faster, but we are increasingly unable to slow down to "understand". How do you say that, listen half, understand quarter, remember zero, and react double. However, as a qualified journalist in the true sense, what you need to output is your "understanding". Fragmented "knowledge" is fleeting.

As is the case with career, so is life.

How can we obtain "understanding" instead of being satisfied with superficial "knowing"?

This requires a journalist or media person who is about to enter the workplace. In this seemingly "wheel of history" is rolling forward. In this world, you can slow down, be calm, follow your own steps, and walk, accumulate, and live in a down-to-earth manner.

Back to reality, sending faxes, making phone calls, or even writing manuscripts every day, how can these trivial things be connected with what Tsinghua University requires of us? Go on the big stage and do big things? Aren’t the two destined to be contradictory?

Teacher Wang Jun, the author of "City Story", once told me that no matter what you do, you must find a big proposition for your work. Take a media person as an example. If you know how to speak, can you find a big question in your conversation? For example, the question he wants to answer is about China? How does the fastest-growing economy in the world complete the task so quickly? Urbanized?. As a result, we read one book after another of his insights.

I still remember him telling me that the world faced by journalists is like a table. How can we become famous quickly and hit the Internet like many so-called "famous journalists" and "famous speakers" nowadays? The best way is to walk along the table and make a precarious appearance to win applause. But don’t forget that there are so many propositions at the center of the table that no one cares about and no one cares about. As a graduate of Tsinghua Journalism School, where do you choose to stand on the table?

A few days ago, I read a Weibo post in which Chen Xianfa, a poet and famous reporter from Xinhua News Agency, wrote: ?Friends who take my private car often complain. Indeed, as a veteran with 20 years of driving experience, I drove too cautiously and drove too slowly. I also had a soaring ride back then, and I was carried three feet away against the wind. Now I drive slower and slower, giving way to anyone I meet. Allow both the humble and the arrogant. Both for those with flat heads and those with curly hair. It accommodates both rickshaw riders and pacing men. I would be a day slower than anyone else in the world. It doesn't matter. The world is moving very fast, please come first -----?

This last sentence touched me in an instant.

The world is moving too fast, so we need to take our time and not worry about the gains and losses of the moment and the moment.

A few days ago, I interviewed the principal of Beijing No. 4 Middle School. He lamented that people nowadays always use the same standards as others to measure themselves at every stage, and they always ask themselves to do better than others. , I never know how to pursue? Is it different from others? Isn’t this difficult for myself?

Yes, there is nothing wrong with going from the accumulation of experience in the past to the accumulation of experience now. But when everyone is rushing to perform and make a difference, your calmness will make you very different from others now and in the future.

Teacher Zhou Qingan once joked that every graduate who returns to school for exchanges will definitely tell his juniors and juniors: "I didn't study seriously at that time. You should study hard?" But wait for this group of juniors. Junior sister has graduated, she will still come back and tell her, "You must study hard." No matter whether you are unfortunate enough to become a typical example of the next class, please remember that graduation should really be the beginning of patience and hard study.

Another meaning of "take your time" is about matter.

When I went back to school for an exchange last year, my freshmen juniors and juniors asked me as soon as they came up: Senior sister, how much do you earn per month? Have you bought a house? Is it enough? I was surprised at the time, and I thought: Today’s children are better than We were much more mature at that time, but we also felt that we were a little too anxious.

Here, I say responsibly that as graduates of Tsinghua University, as long as you can work as hard as normal people, In the future, most people will have no problem living a life without worries about food and clothing.

Of course, you may also laugh at me: Senior sister, you are too worried, we are graduates with ideals, how can we go around the house and car every day, ugh!?

Don't laugh. The impact of the environment on people cannot be underestimated. You don't worry now because the environment around you is very simple. When the people around you are discussing houses, cars, bills, and children, it can take as little as a month or as long as six months, and you will be just like them, not calm.

At that time, I hope you will remember a saying: If you fill your head when you are young, you can fill your pockets when you are older; if you rush to fill your pockets when you are young, maybe when you are old, your head and pockets will be full. is empty.

In short, there will be bread and drinkable Mengniu milk. Let’s not be in a hurry and take our time. Whether you believe it or not, I believe it anyway.

Tsinghua University Graduation Speech 2

Dear classmates, respected teachers and parents: Good morning, everyone!

Today I am extremely honored to be an alumnus On behalf of the students, I came to witness an important moment in the lives of the students. First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt congratulations to you!

When I accepted this invitation, I only thought that this is the highest honor as a Tsinghua alumnus. Little did he realize how difficult a task it was. When I started to prepare the speech, I realized how ignorant I was of my decision to accept the invitation rashly. Because the students here come from dozens of different majors and are about to face completely different careers and life paths.

As someone who has basically never stepped out of the ivory tower in the past two decades, has a relatively simple way of thinking, and has a relatively weak life experience, what can I tell you? The past two weeks have been comparable to writing academic papers for me. Dissertations are much more painful. After thinking hard, I decided to share with you my journey of leaving and returning to Tsinghua University for more than ten years, my past insights and my future ambitions. I hope that when you stand at such an important turning point in your life, you will also take a few minutes to think about yourself in the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.

I don’t know if my classmates have watched the second season of "A Bite of China". The conclusion of the last episode impressed me deeply: If we look for answers in the wisdom of our ancestors, they may warn us like this A short life: a thousand mansions, only six feet to sleep at night; a rich family, but only three meals a day? I wonder if there are people like me who have been confused about the meaning of human existence since childhood.

People come from nature, return to nature, and pass it down from generation to generation. What’s the point? One of the reasons why I chose the Department of Biology is also to explore the mysteries of life. However, after I systematically understood life from the molecular level in college, this problem was not solved, but made me even more confused. Suddenly one day, it suddenly dawned on me: Only conscious humans can ask this question about the "meaning of existence"; then only conscious humans can define the "meaning of existence".

So, the meaning of life is essentially a subjective proposition. With the development of the times, personal backgrounds and encounters are different, and everyone's definition of this proposition will be very different, which determines the pursuit of goals and life paths. I myself experienced a transition from confusion to relative clarity.

Today, 14 years ago, happened to be the day I left Tsinghua University. I still remember, walking on the east-west main road shaded by green trees, I silently thought: How happy it would be if one day I could return to work in this garden. Like you, I spent my colorful youth in this garden, gained friendships that continue to this day, grew from an ignorant boy to a young man with independent thinking, and am full of reluctance and nostalgia for this beautiful garden.

However, apart from this vague goal of returning one day, I am actually at a loss as to my future career choices. But there is one principle that has stuck with me to this day, and that is: strive to do your best and let the choice rest in your own hands.

One month later, I rushed to the other side of the ocean and entered Princeton University on the east coast of the United States. In 2004, I received my PhD in molecular biology. If Tsinghua University in the 1990s gave me a sense of responsibility for the world, then Princeton in the 21st century completely pulled me into the palace of science. Tsinghua and Princeton have both been selected as the ten most beautiful campuses in the world. Tsinghua is solemn and majestic, while Princeton is elegant and calm.

At Princeton, the person who teaches you in slovenly clothes may be a Nobel Prize winner or a senior academician. The person sitting opposite you while taking a nap in the coffee shop may also be the scientific adviser to the President of the United States. There, whether you are an undergraduate or a Nobel laureate, you will not feel the superiority between people at all. Everyone is content and happy, but they also have the unique uniqueness of this university to go their own way and be unruly.

In this environment, you will feel at ease to be yourself and do your own thing very focused; impetuousness can easily be blocked by the school wall that does not exist physically.

In my first year at Princeton, I suddenly discovered that the noble and cool knowledge in the textbooks turned out to be created by these seemingly easy-going old gentlemen and ladies around me; there were no textbooks in the graduate courses, but all Classic or cutting-edge original papers are used as teaching materials, so in class we are reviewing the creation of the history of science. When we enter the laboratory, we have actually become the creators of human knowledge and the creators of scientific history.

With this understanding, my pursuit goal gradually evolved into: discovering certain natural mysteries and leaving my own mark on the history of science. When I define such a meaning of life, it also means that I have chosen a free lifestyle, a way of thinking that asks for trouble, and a way of existence that makes me happy. I am completely obsessed with this small world: I will be satisfied to have a direct dialogue with nature, I will be elated to discuss with the sages across time and space through papers, and I will be enthusiastic about the sense of accomplishment brought by a little progress and discovery.

Of course, there are setbacks and troubles in this process. However, just as a good drama must have conflicts brought about by the villain to be exciting, these setbacks and trials in scientific research will be recalled more vividly after a few years, making the process rich and full of flavors.

Let me tell you a short story that happened in Tsinghua University, so that you can see the magnificence in the ivory tower. When I first returned to Tsinghua University in 2007, I set several clear topics for myself to tackle. The glucose transporter I made not long ago was one of them. There was also another very meaningful topic called voltage-gated sodium ions. Channel,

It is crucial for the transmission of our nerve signals.

To make a long story short, in the blink of an eye, it was 2011. After several years of exploration, we finally obtained a crystal of a bacterial homologous protein. The structural analysis was close at hand, and we just needed to collect the heavy metal derivative data for the last time. . For this purpose, we prepared a large number of crystals, stored them in liquid nitrogen precooling tanks that can maintain a low temperature of minus 170 degrees Celsius, and sent them to Japan Synchrotron Radiation to prepare for data collection.

What follows is a day I will never forget, July 11, 2011. If you check the calendar, it's Monday, the day when you see a new Nature paper go online in China. I was supposed to leave for the airport at 6 o'clock in the morning. At 5:55, I opened "Nature" online. The first article directly hit my eyes and hurt because the title of this article was "A voltage-gated sodium "Crystal Structure of Ion Channels", that is to say, we have been surpassed by others.

We have always said that there is only first place in science, not second place. Now it is really impossible to be the first, a disastrous failure! When I printed out the paper and handed it to Zhang Xu, the student who was doing this subject, she immediately burst into tears. However, the crystal is still waiting for us in Japan. So everything went as planned and we flew to Japan. After running all the way, when I arrived at the experimental line station at 7 o'clock in the evening, the staff there said to me solemnly: "Professor Yan, there seems to be something wrong with the cryogenic tank you sent."

My heart sank. This means that there may be a big problem with the crystal. This is the fruit of our efforts in the past three months! After just enduring the blow of being surpassed, is this accident really? The house leaks but it rains all night?

Fortunately, we always prepared for rainy days and brought a lot of crystals with us, so we started soaking the heavy metal again on the spot. When it was time to officially collect the data the next morning, sure enough, all the crystals sent were killed, and none of them were. One available. However, just when we were about to despair after spending more than ten hours, a crystal that had just been processed the night before gave us all the data we needed? The quality was so good that within an hour of receiving the data , we solved the structure!

At this time, the research group that published the paper has not released the structural information from the database, so for us, this is the first time we have seen the atomic structure of this type of protein. It was still a perfect ending to the past four years! At that moment, I didn’t even care about what kind of papers I could publish. My heart was filled only with the ecstasy brought by the huge contrast between before and after.

And the story is not over yet. When I opened my mailbox at three o'clock in the morning and prepared to arrange follow-up work for the laboratory members immediately, I found an email from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States. I was notified that after the preliminary selection, I passed the test among 800 applicants from around the world and became one of the 55 people who entered the second round of the Howard Hughes International Young Scientists. I was invited to go to the United States in November to participate in the final competition. At that moment, these two sentences suddenly appeared in my mind: "The house is leaking but it rains all night, and the willows and flowers are dark and the flowers are bright in another village."

From 5:55 a.m. on July 11, 2011 to 3 a.m. on July 13, 2011, these 45 hours were really thrilling for me and my students, like riding a roller coaster. Because of this, this process is far more memorable than any other subject that goes smoothly.

But this is still not the final end of the story. Because of this topic, I was fortunate to collaborate with Professor MacKinnon, an idol scientist whom I had admired for nearly 10 years and the 2003 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. I benefited a lot from my exchanges with him and finally fulfilled my dream as a graduate student. A long-cherished dream to work with him.

More importantly, our structure is very different from the published papers. After analysis and interpretation, our new results were also published in "Nature" 10 months later. I also proposed a new model of voltage-gated channels sensing membrane potential, and we are still creating new methods and building new tools to verify this model.

You see, this is the charm of scientific research: without moving forward, you cannot easily define success or failure. There are always so many uncertainties and so many unexpected surprises waiting for you! This experience and this feeling are really addictive!

Looking back on the 18 years since I entered Tsinghua University. , I am very grateful: my alma mater has shaped my healthy and uplifting personality, living in a peaceful era, with no worries about food and clothing; I have the love of my relatives, the support of my teachers, the trust of my friends, and the dependence of my students; and thanks to economic development, the country has the ability to Support basic scientific research. I am grateful for the opportunities and gifts given to me by the times, the country, and my alma mater; I also have a deeper understanding of my personal responsibility to my alma mater and the country. I believe that this is actually the sense of mission that permeates the bones of every Tsinghua person.

For our alma mater, all of us here are at the right time in life and shoulder the responsibility of building her into a world-class university. In my mind, when a large number of young people trained by Tsinghua and a large number of young people starting from Tsinghua become world-class scholars, when some of our work has a lasting impact on the history of human science and civilization , we can proudly declare: Tsinghua is a world-class university.

We have encountered an unprecedented opportunity with you. We have the conditions and the ability to use our own concrete actions to achieve this goal, which is not an unattainable goal. I hope every student can remember: If you think our alma mater is not a world-class university today, then let us turn it into a world-class university through everyone's efforts!

< p> For our country, our generation, especially those of you who, like me, regard scientific research as a lifelong career, have an unshirkable responsibility: economic development determines how rich China is, and scientific and technological development determines how strong China is. Let China's scientific and technological strength be worthy of its economic size, and let China's scientific research results have a global impact. I think this is the most fundamental responsibility and mission of Chinese scientists for the country.

Dear students, looking at you at this moment, I am as excited as you are. There are countless possibilities for your future, but everyone lives only once. In this era of information explosion and plans that cannot keep up with changes, I hope that every Tsinghua person will use your original intention to explore the meaning of your life, strive to know yourself, be yourself, stick to your inner choices, and firmly strive to realize your goals. Act bravely and focused to achieve the meaning of life. I sincerely wish every student a wonderful life and write the history that you think is the most important!

Thank you everyone! ;