Series 1: From Student to Teacher
This is an article I wrote for the Software School’s journal. The original had no title, just content. Since the blog’s title field apparently can’t be null, I made up a name. I’ll post it slowly.
【Prologue】 Time flies, years pass like a shuttle. Looking back at 2002 when I joined Tongji University Software School as one of the first transfer students, to now becoming a teacher at the school, more than six years have passed. So many memorable things have happened, so many unforgettable experiences. I pick up my pen but don’t know where to begin. Let me extract some fragments from these six years of life, to share with you all while encouraging myself.
“Crossing Sichuan is harder than reaching the blue sky” — The first two years of undergraduate study
I entered Tongji University from Shandong through the college entrance exam in 2000. I applied for Civil Engineering, but my score wasn’t high enough. Meanwhile, Tongji had just merged with Railway University in 2000, dramatically increasing enrollment. The Accounting department, originally with only 30 students, suddenly expanded to 160. So I was调剂 to Accounting — a half-arts, half-science major. My first two years of university involved敲 an abacus rather than a keyboard.
Before university, I had barely touched computers. But my first computer course, “Computer Culture” (about using Windows and Office), sparked a strong interest in computers. I was eager to explore the secrets inside those bulky, mysterious black boxes. So whenever I had the chance, I’d go to the school’s computer lab. Back then, each student got a paper computer card, and staff would punch a hole each time you used a machine. To get more time, I’d use a knife to scrape off the holes. I was once caught for this scheme and wrote a self-criticism letter. I wonder if that letter is still preserved somewhere at the school.
In my second semester, the school offered Visual Basic programming for non-CS majors. This was my first接触 with programming. There’s a joke in the industry: “No matter what language you use, it won’t stop you from being a good programmer — as long as it’s not VB.” That said, VB ignited my passion for programming. In my spare time, I developed many small programs for fun. Looking back today, my approach was very “wild,” but I fondly remember my fearless rookie spirit.
For example, there was a textbook exercise to write a program that sorts an array. The naive me had no idea about bubble sort, heap sort, or Shell sort. I discovered that the ListBox control has a Sort method, so I put all array elements into a ListBox, called Sort, then took the data back out. The teacher said this was wrong — I had to figure out sorting myself. I racked my brains but couldn’t solve it. Later, comparing with the textbook’s bubble sort algorithm, I found my thinking was actually the same as bubble sort. My only mistake was when swapping two variables, I wrote A = B; B = A.
During those two years in Accounting, driven by my love for computers, I also took the Shanghai Intermediate Computer Exam and a minor in Computer Science at Tongji. The Shanghai Intermediate Computer Exam was interesting — the content was a bit dated, but the most famous prep book was written by our esteemed Professor Wan Jinyou. During the course, the teacher mentioned that Professor Wan was a legendary figure in Tongji’s computer field, but unfortunately he had gone to America (2000 was the year he was working in the US — later he returned and founded our Software School)… This was my first indirect encounter as his student.
As for the CS minor, I remember spending weekends studying Microcomputer Principles and Data Structures. I later gave up when the Graphics teacher bragged that he could make a better graphics system than Windows with just a few graduate students. I also taught myself web design — starting with HTML, then VBScript, then ASP with database connections. I even built my own website. Still, I always felt like an amateur.