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Editor's Note
Sail across the vast sea to seek a distant journey, painting a new chapter in the flourishing of the wind. The sound of Li Ge begins, and the graduation season of 2024 arrives as scheduled. The official WeChat account of the School of Statistics and Management inherits tradition and will continue to launch a series of reports on outstanding graduates, showcasing the style of outstanding graduates in the school. First class majors cultivate first-class undergraduate talents. While sharing the fruitful results of talent cultivation, we sincerely hope that more students can draw nourishment, gather strength, and continue to write brilliance from the growth process of outstanding graduates. I also wish every graduate a bright future, live up to their youth, and forge ahead. Please stay tuned for a long time!
Yu Yihan
Level 20 Statistical Experimental Class
Graduation destination: Tsinghua University Columbia University Dual Master's Degree Program in Business Analysis
Award-winning
2023.10/2022.10/2021.10: People's Scholarship
November 2020: Second Prize in the National College English Competition
December 2021: First Prize in the National Huiyuan Data Competition
May 2022: Third Prize in the National Market Research Competition
2022.08: Third Prize in the National Statistical Modeling Competition
01 Dawn dew, filled with longing
In my freshman year, filled with aspirations and dreams for the future, I stepped onto the campus of a university. Participating in various club activities, campus competitions, and collective team building, freshman days are fresh and full of vitality. Under the "warning" of my seniors, I did not slack off in my studies and achieved a high GPA. At that time, I was eager to visit overseas as a graduate student, and I had already formulated English study plans such as GRE and TOEFL, and found a North American study abroad agency.
In my first year of adulthood, I experienced the taste of freedom and independence, as well as the joy of growth and progress.
Hard study and perseverance, there will be gains
As my freshman year came to an end, with a little basic professional preparation, I also started leading teams to participate in various competitions and events. Compared to professional courses that require specific knowledge, competition projects are a great opportunity to apply knowledge to practice and explore one's interests, as well as a platform to make like-minded friends. In competitions such as statistical modeling, market research, and data modeling for American college students, I have won awards that are helpful for my future studies and applications for various honors. I have also made friends who can share their academic and career development together.
At the same time, the academic pressure of my sophomore year began to gradually increase, and I began to feel the tension and challenges from my studies. Due to heavy academic workload and frequent exams, I need to spend more time and energy preparing and reviewing in order to maintain my GPA. Under the impact of the epidemic, anxiety and unease have been heightened, the GRE exam has been cancelled twice, and the plan for the English exam has been completely disrupted. Fortunately, with the company and comfort of friends and family, I managed to get through my sophomore year with only a slight drop in GPA. I also changed my original offline GRE exam to an online GRE exam, and with a renewed mindset, I continued to prepare for the exam, ultimately achieving a good score.
In my busy sophomore year, I experienced the bitterness and hardship of learning, but also reaped the fruits of diligence and perseverance.
03 Mood is like waves, fluctuating and fluctuating
In the third year of college, academic pressure is still very heavy, and everyone is striving to achieve high GPA in order to improve or maintain their ranking. For me, who was still determined to study abroad and had my English exam plans disrupted and postponed, I also faced the pressure of a language exam. Faced with the pandemic, maintaining my GPA, and taking the English exam, these three things have already left me struggling in my junior year, and my original internship plan has ultimately been cancelled.
With the arrival of my junior year, my high GPA classmates around me are gradually preparing for graduate summer camps at various universities. I am also starting to question my choice - is it necessary to go abroad? Is American education recognized in China? Is it easy to find a job abroad in China? A series of questions made me start to waver, thinking that I had no internship experience at all. If I went to the United States as a graduate student, I might not have enough internship experience. In the end, I hastily decided to start preparing for summer camps and applied for summer camps at Fudan and Tsinghua schools. If I didn't get a satisfactory domestic master's program, I would consider studying abroad. Fortunately, there is a lot of overlap between the preparation required for studying abroad and the requirements for summer camps. I only need to prepare for the written exams and interviews for summer camps. The mathematical background brought by professional training courses and competition research projects also makes me favored by the projects. In the end, I chose the Tsinghua Columbia Business Analytics Dual Master's Program, which allows me to balance studying abroad and interning in China, as I was awarded the two excellent qualifications from Fudan and Tsinghua.
When facing numerous choices and uncertainties in my junior year, I felt incredibly confused and perplexed, but I also found a path that suited me through twists and turns.
04 Practice hands-on and plan for the future
After determining my direction for further education, I thought I could lie down peacefully, but I realized that things were not that simple. In the communication with my classmates, I found that I am still a "novice" - among the classmates who have completed graduate projects or other recommended programs, there are those who have already had five or six internship experiences, as well as those who have contacted Tsinghua mentors and started research early on. They have strong coding ability, algorithms, and both front-end and back-end capabilities... There are so many experts, and I can only continue to work hard to catch up.
To intern, to study, to write a thesis, senior year can be said to be not easy at all. But in my senior year, I also achieved the greatest growth. Through the preparation for the internship interview and written test, I have improved my coding skills and constructed a theoretical framework for machine learning and deep learning; Through internships and training in different industries and positions, I have come to understand the gap between the skills required for work and the knowledge learned in school, and have also reflected on career development directions that can reflect my personal value; During the research process of my graduation thesis, I also realized that I am more suitable for entering the job market with a master's degree than pursuing a doctoral degree.
In my senior year, it was still a stage of continuous progress. I explored my interests and potential, searching for directions and goals that suited me.
05 Pursuing the true self, the road is long and blocked
During these four years of college, I have experienced excitement, tension, confusion, and progress, as well as continued pressure to compare myself with peers and embrace the new challenges that the times have given us. In the context of social competition and market changes, I believe the most important thing is to stabilize one's core, listen to one's own heart, not go with the flow, and do what is truly suitable and enjoyable. The financial market will rise and fall, and the tide of the Internet may eventually fade. No industry or post can always be in the wind of the times. When the foam is broken and the dividend disappears, only love can make the years long.
I also hope that everyone can experience every moment during their college years, cherish every growth, harvest bitterness and happiness, seek love and goals, and bloom their own flowers of growth.
The School of Statistics and Management is deeply innovating its talent training model, actively reforming practice, consolidating professional foundations, deepening school enterprise cooperation, attaching importance to collaborative education, and striving to promote students to combine theory with practice. It is committed to cultivating first-class composite statistical talents with firm ideological beliefs, strong political positions, profound professional foundations, and solid research abilities, and contributing statistical wisdom to the construction of a world-class university with distinctive financial and economic characteristics.
