The College held a lecture on the Final Lesson for Graduates for the whole of class of 2021 on the afternoon of 23 June, 2021. Student Tutor Yang Mingquan moderated the lecture and Dean Xie Zhiyong was the keynote speaker.
“Both China and foreign countries are gradually changing their views on China, especially after the epidemic. Students should grasp the opportunities of the times”, Xie Zhiyong said: “the present is a turning point of the times”.
He gave four sentences of expectation to the graduates. The first sentence was that he hopes the students have a firm and persistent belief. Taking Mao Zedong as an example, he explained how the great man’s original intention remained unchanged throughout his life, and encouraged his students to remain true to their original intention and forge ahead.
The second sentence was that may the students have a down-to-earth drive. He said that everyone has an imagination and a goal, but the degree of achievement is often very different, and this has a lot to do with personal motivation. He took himself as an example, saying that during his time as the Deputy Dean of the Graduate School of CUPL, he had visited many colleges and universities at home and abroad, in order to find the most suitable solution for the design of “wisdom classroom” of the University. He also said that the path of the career cannot be controlled by an individual, and many of the persistence may not be immediately effective, this kind of “slow and late” wear down the will of most people, students must remember the lessons of previous generations, avoid quick success, make good use of time to release self-vitality, stick to their imaginations and realize self-value.
The third sentence was that it is necessary to have a wise and intelligent choice. He believed that wisdom is gained from repeated internal struggles and setbacks, during which the students must maintain a rational mind to make choices and look for instability based on stability, where stability is learned and shown to others, and in the subsequent experience, even if the inner order was severely impacted, they should remain conscious and restrained to continue to choose.
The fourth sentence was that students should cultivate their own interesting soul. In life, people need to achieve a lot of goals, at this time a companionship of an interesting soul is very much needed; otherwise, life is likely to be filled with trivial boring fragments. Therefore, students need to cultivate aesthetic interest, look for the minds to find beauty, and explore the meaning of self-life.
At the end of the lecture, Yang Mingquan delivered a short speech entitled Gain and loss. She believed that people always feel anxious in comparison with others, so there is no need to worry about temporary gains and losses. She suggested the students who have already found an ideal job to remain calm as the future is much broader and those not to remain brave as temporary frustration shall not to be feared. “Students need to know more about what they really want than they do right now”, she said.
At last, on behalf of the College faculty, Yang said: “I wish all the 2021 graduates happy graduation,” and quoted the poem: “send you far away, thousands of miles of spring breeze”.
