My Honest Opinions About Universities

Now that I’ve officially become a master’s student at Georgia Tech, I want to take a moment to reflect on my experiences at three different universities I’ve attended.

I did my undergraduate at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). It was a bitter-sweet time in my life. Well, maybe a touch more on the bitter side. HKUST is no doubt among the top universities in the world, in terms of rankings. For an 18-year-old Taiwanese high school student, there weren’t many factors that I knew of to consider when making such decisions. I was used to evaluating things in numbers, and so was HKUST.

In my experience, HKUST has a very utilitarian style of education. It places tremendous focus on business and engineering, and both produce strong employment outcomes. With outstanding career reports and employer ratings, HKUST climbed up the rankings ladder at an unimaginable speed, despite being a very young university. The atmosphere at HKUST is very competitive: the library is packed from day one of the semester, and literally everyone is internship hunting, even first-year students.

A big reason people grind so hard is the harsh grading. HKUST applies general curving for all classes, which means no matter how well you actually do, only a specific number of students can get A’s. Basically, life at HKUST is about competing. Students compete for internships, for majors, and for the scarce seats of A’s in every course.

At some point, students stop considering “what do I want to learn?” when enrolling courses. Instead, they ask, “who do I have to beat in this class to get an A?” or “what semester should I take this course so that I can have the weakest peer quality?” This competitive culture HKUST embodied has led students to treat everything like a zero-sum game. And I believe this is the real detriment. It is strange to enter a classroom with animosity among peers. People are lowkey happy when somebody else messes up a quiz, an exam, or an assignment. Because that means your position moves up one spot.

I don’t blame the strategy that HKUST uses to gain reputation. For a university, especially a young one without a rich historical heritage, it is necessary to play the ranking games for exposure. And for people who aim to work at famous companies, this culture might be a catalyst to push them further. And it is true that people around me have all entered good companies once they graduated, including myself. But hardly anyone misses their time at school. To some extent, we were all traumatized by the cut-throat environment that constantly put us into countless rat races.

I am not writing to rant about HKUST. Instead, I hope a passage like this can free you from the anxiety of constantly comparing yourself to others. If you are currently studying there, I hope you can find meaningful things to learn, and find ways to detach from the hamster wheel.

During 2020, I went to National Taiwan University (NTU) as a visiting student in light of the pandemic. The first thing I noticed was the drastic gap in resources between NTU and HKUST. Although the buildings were shabby, I actually focused more on the things I was learning than on comparing myself to peers. It’s just a small difference: NTU doesn’t conduct general curving, and the toxic atmosphere is gone. I stopped caring about how I compared to others and started focusing more on what interested me. I took CS classes that were known to be hard, and Stoicism, which sparked my passion for philosophy. The workload was still heavy, and I didn’t ace all the tests. But I felt stress-free, and there was no bad blood among peers. Most importantly, I got to learn new things that span across fields without being afraid to make mistakes.

I have a similar feeling at Georgia Tech. Yes, the workload and the materials are still hard and exhausting. But learning is supposed to be a little bit stressful. The point is, where does this stress come from? It should come from the difficulty of the very knowledge itself, not from the mental burden of competing with people around you.

It is ironic that among the three schools, HKUST is actually the easiest in terms of the depth of materials.

A zero-sum mindset will probably get you an internship at a reputable company in your junior year, and that’s it. Most of the important things in life, including wealth, knowledge, happiness, and relationships, are long-term infinite games. You should play these games with long-term people, and with a non-zero-sum mindset.

For most people, university is the last stop of their education journey. We were trained to optimize with numbers and evaluate ourselves through rankings all the way up to high school. I really doubt that the last stage of education should reinforce the idea of competing and then send people off into their lives. Strip away the prestige, the rankings, the alumni network, the career reports — what should a university provide?