What Sparked This#

I was working out at the gym today when I happened to overhear two students in my year chatting nearby.

Much of what they talked about was stuff I almost never pay attention to: GPA, comprehensive assessment rankings, class committee roles, competitions, part-time jobs, social circles, and other people’s gym numbers…

As I listened, I suddenly felt a strange sense of how many different lives were unfolding around me.

It hit me that, in places I barely notice, the people around me are all living, striving, comparing, and building things in their own ways.

On the way back from the gym, I thought about it more carefully. I realized there had always been people like this around me; I just hadn’t really stopped to observe them.

With that spark of inspiration, I wrote this piece to try to sort out one question:

What kinds of paths do Chinese university students, as I see them, take?

My Earlier Assumptions#

Before I started university, the mainstream story I heard made it seem as though there were only two paths:

Further study, or a job.

Take the postgraduate entrance exam, get recommended for a place, or study abroad, then keep going up the academic ladder; or get an internship, join campus recruiting, and enter the job market as soon as possible.

Back then, a somewhat self-important side of me didn’t really want either path.

I’d rather spend my time on things I was interested in: learning technology, building projects and games, making websites, experimenting with servers and AI, then turning all of that into work I could actually show people.

To be honest, I also carried a sense of superiority I wasn’t quite comfortable admitting:

Maybe I wasn’t following either of the paths everyone else took.

Maybe I was doing something more “special.”

So it came naturally to me to reduce many people at university to a few blurry labels:

The serious students, the ones preparing for jobs, the people who played games all day…

I rarely made a real effort to find out what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what they were building along the way.

The Moment It Clicked#

It happened this evening.

At the gym, two textbook “muscle-bound social butterflies” seemed to show up and launch into a full-blown mutual-praise session. That was my joking label for them, anyway.

As they worked out, they talked as if no one else were around:

“Didn’t you rank around twentieth in your major on the comprehensive assessment?”
“You can still score over 90 on a make-up exam.”
“And you have a part-time job, too.”
“Doesn’t your roommate serve as a class officer and compete in contests?”
“What’s-his-name can bench-press this much.”
“The comprehensive assessment scores in that major are really high this year…”

Even when talking about their own grades, one of them casually added:

“Honestly, I didn’t study that seriously. I mostly worked out, looked over things a bit before finals, and it turned out fine.”

I was standing there, listening in a daze.

They were talking about things I would never normally go out of my way to learn about:

How the comprehensive assessment is calculated, who is entering which competition, which major is more competitive, who holds what class role, who knows whom, and who has found a good part-time job…

For them, all of this seemed like a perfectly ordinary part of university life.

For me, it felt as if someone had suddenly opened a door I would never normally think to push.

Things I don’t care about may matter a great deal to someone else.

That was when I suddenly realized:

The people around me may seem ordinary only because I can’t see the system they’re playing.

Then I started thinking about my roommates.

One is the class monitor, takes part in algorithm competitions, has a strong GPA and comprehensive assessment score, and has a fairly clear goal of working in an algorithms-related field. At the same time, he can still stay up late playing games.

Another takes part in more social and class activities. His grades may not stand out as much, but his university life clearly focuses more on experiences and relationships. He often plays online games with other people, too.

Another plays gacha games, takes part-time jobs during winter and summer breaks, and has a few regular friends in class he likes to hang out with.

And what about me?

Most of my time goes into development, technology, and making things.

I’m not very interested in coursework itself, and at one point I came close to giving up on it altogether. My attitude toward employment has also been casual: as long as I can support myself later, I see a job as a fallback.

I tinker with websites, servers, AI, and game development, and I work out too. But I have little interest in campus social life, and I’m not very into large multiplayer games.

I don’t play that many games, either. Most of the ones I do play are single-player and indie games; I’m pretty much an indie-game purist.

As for meeting people in person, that’s been a bit of a disaster for me.

There are probably only two or three people in my major I can really talk to about game development, and even with them, we mostly keep a polite distance.

I don’t strike up conversations for no reason. At group activities, I often just sit quietly in a corner and blend into the background.

If you looked only at the public-facing version of campus life, I might be the ordinary one—or even the one who seems to be neglecting the things I should be doing.

But if someone stepped into my world and saw me making games, building websites, tinkering with technology, writing, and making videos, they might come away with a completely different impression.

At that point, the old question of “Who’s more impressive?” suddenly seemed much less straightforward.

The Map I See#

If we look only at where people end up, the paths university students take can of course be roughly condensed into a few options:

Further study, employment, civil-service or public-institution jobs, starting a business, freelancing, or not knowing yet.

But if the question is:

“How are you planning to live during these years at university?”

Then things get much more complicated:

Some people pour their time into studying, GPA, postgraduate recommendations, and exams;
some settle on a career direction early and start building projects, competing, and looking for internships;
some treat university as a place to expand their social circles, joining student organizations, clubs, and all kinds of activities to meet many different people;
some care more about life itself—dating, gaming, traveling, working out, joining activities—and feel that enjoying these few years is already enough;
some disappear into a small technical niche. They may not be very visible on campus, while privately they are already exploring it in great depth;

And some start thinking about making money early.

Even “making money” can take very different forms.

Some lean toward technology and try to earn through development, AI, quantitative research, software services, and similar work;
others are better at working with people and putting resources together. They might run a campus business, buy and resell goods, provide information services, partner with nearby businesses, or organize people around small projects.

Of course, some approaches skirt school rules or clearly violate them. That’s a different matter.

If we widen the view from campus to the internet, the map gets even more surprising.

Some university students may already run accounts with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers;
some are building indie products;
some contribute to open source;
some have started businesses;
some take on freelance projects using their skills;
and some had already built far more experience and resources in a particular field than their peers before they even entered university.

But here’s what’s really interesting:

These aren’t mutually exclusive types.

One person can be a high-GPA student, a fitness enthusiast, a part-time worker, a club member, and a gamer all at once.
A tech nerd can also be great at socializing.
Someone who plays games every day might spend every winter and summer break working part-time.
Someone who seems to do nothing but study might also run an account, work on projects, and be in a relationship.

So instead of asking how many “types” of university students there are, maybe:

Each of us is putting points into several different skill trees.

Study, work, technology, money, social life, creativity, exercise, entertainment, romance, and interests…

Together, they form a one-of-a-kind character sheet.

We Often Can’t See One Another#

When I meet other people who work out at the gym, the first thing I can usually see is just one shared dimension: “we both work out.”

Because I don’t only work out—I also make games and other creative work, tinker with technology, and know a few fairly niche things—I might quietly think I’m “pretty impressive.”

The other person might think:

They lift more, are better at socializing, know more of what’s happening at school, and have good grades too, so they’re also “pretty impressive.”

That’s the interesting part.

We may see only one attribute of someone else, yet compare it with our own full stat sheet.

And so, without knowing anything about each other, both people can end up thinking:

“I might still be the more impressive one.”

But in reality, we’re simply living in two different systems of evaluation.

They don’t know how late I stayed up last night debugging a game mechanic.

I don’t know how much time they put into competitions, GPA, part-time work, or relationships.

I see only one slice of them.

They see only one slice of me.

Maybe a lot of the strange superiority we feel toward one another comes from this:

We compare our whole selves with only the small part of someone else that they show us.

Finally#

I suddenly realized that maybe this is a miniature version of society as a whole.

No wonder people always say that university is a small society.

It really is complicated.

All kinds of systems are woven together. Everyone is dropped into this place called university with different starting traits and resources, then finds their own way through the same instance.

There has never been one universally “correct way to play” university.

We all start with different attributes and spend these few years putting points into completely different skill trees on the same map.

And when we sometimes find other people ordinary, strange, or even “neglecting the important things,” perhaps it’s only because we don’t understand the system they’re playing.

Thinking about it this way, the campus I walk through every day feels a little less familiar, and a little more vivid.

The next time I pass a stranger on campus, I think I’ll wonder:

What else might be hidden in this person’s stat sheet?