A Speech by Xia Zhihong on behalf of all faculty members at the Opening Ceremony 2017 of South University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)

Several Figures Help You Look into the Future

By Xia Zhihong (on behalf of all faculty members)

Sept 10, 2017

Dear students and fellow teachers,

Good Morning!

First of all, welcome all new students to SUSTech. Two years ago, I told freshmen that you were courageous enough to apply for SUSTech because you should be sufficiently confident in China’s education reform and in exploration of frontier sciences. I was honored to witness the rapid development of SUSTech in two years. Today, SUSTech is one of the easy choices for most candidates.

As a mathematician, I’m particularly sensitive to figures. So I’d like to highlight several figures in my speech. Many of you scored very high in the national entrance examination and even ranked among the top 300 or 500 in your respective provinces, which indicates nothing more than good luck along with strong competence to pass exams. Congratulations! Many others probably only ranked among top 2000 in their province simply because of an error in solving a question on the examination paper. What I intend to say is that you all are excellent but you need to put your scores aside from now on. Do not play the peacock for higher scores. Nor should you feel disconsolate because of low exam marks. According to results of our big data analysis, interestingly there is no relevance between total scores of candidates reaching up to admission standards and their academic records in SUSTech. That’s to say, the points you scored during national entrance examination is irrelevant to your future development in SUSTech.

Then, you may ask me what is specifically related to your academic achievements in SUSTech. My answer is that the final exam score of the math course in the first year will be as highly correlative to your academic records as up to 0.8. Therefore, please work hard especially on the math course after you have adapted to the learning environment in SUSTech.

Again, you may ask me how to learn math better in the first year. You’ve already grown up and are no longer babies of your parents. Now a sense of responsibility arises from your heart, right? Yes, you desire to be responsible for your parents, for the society, but you need to be first of all responsible for yourself. You’ll benefit a lot from a good life style and learning habits throughout your life. Big data analysis results have shown that students achieve a higher GPA if they leave their dorms during 7:00-8:00am and come back during 12:00-13:00pm. So do those who have their meals on time. Students who burn the midnight oil usually end up with either fairly good or poor scores, depending on what they are burning the midnight oil for: playing online games or reading books. So, what will you do to spend the nighttime? Just think about it.

With rapid development of science and technology and advancement of artificial intelligence, it is predicted that 47% of current jobs will disappear in ten years and that 65% of future jobs will be totally different than the current ones. How to face the future? In my opinion, development of personal capacity will be crucial in the future. Students’ basic skills and analytic ability will be a priority among priorities. Dear students, do you have the courage to choose challenging courses so as to lay a solid foundation for future studies? 

The last but not the least, I hopefully suggest that you do more physical exercises. Let’s make an appointment: We start running 10km per week, 520km per year, and when the four-year university life ends we will have covered the full distance from SUSTech to Tian’anmen Square, a little more than 2000km. Are you willing to join?

Wish you a healthy and pleasant life in SUSTech.

Thank you. 

Proofread by: Jeremy Welburn