An Ordinary Birthday, a Typical Day
Today is my 31st birthday. 31 years, without me noticing. Let me record today as a typical day in my student life.
7:00 AM, woken up by the double-decker bus downstairs. Checked the time, went back to sleep.
9:00 AM, officially got up. Opened my iPad and saw the reminder: “Zongjian He’s Birthday.” It startled me—I knew my birthday was approaching, but didn’t realize it was today. Been a bit dazed from rushing a paper the past few days.
9:30 AM, officially left for school. Since it’s my birthday, I decided to have breakfast. Ordered congee and rice noodle roll at the canteen, plus a hot coffee—17.5 HKD.
10:00 AM, arrived at the office, checked emails. Some annoying thesis review matters from Tongji’s part-time master’s students. Still have to deal with it. Replied to emails.
10:30 AM, started thinking about research problems. Closed the laptop, drew diagrams and symbols on paper, thinking until I wanted to bang my head against the wall.
12:30 PM, problem about half thought through. Had to TA—running a Java lab for students. Rushed to the lab—only a few students showed up. A mainland student disputed her homework grade. Argued—she switched back to Mandarin after three sentences of English. Fine by me—you want to pay Hong Kong tuition and get mainland treatment? I don’t care.
1:30 PM, rushed to the canteen. Two-dish meal with soup—21.5 HKD. Finished in 5 minutes.
1:50 PM, printed my half-finished problem and rushed to a meeting with labmates.
2:00 PM, VANET group meeting. My problem got challenged—assumptions too strong, not practical. Back to the drawing board. Of course, I challenged others’ work too.
4:30 PM, meeting ended. Went back to write the group summary.
5:30 PM, dinner. Discussed with a labmate the possibility of combining VANET and Cloud—what issues exist. Felt the application might be the connection point, but didn’t want to do a one-shot deal. Temporarily postponed.
6:30 PM, evening class—Information Retrieval. The teacher announced midterm scores, saying the highest was 99.5. Kept glancing at me. I asked, “Why do you keep looking at me? Could that 99.5 be me?” The teacher smiled but didn’t answer. The class wasn’t hard—covering evaluation metrics for search algorithms. For research students, false positive and false negative are routine. The teacher asked: “Think of an application requirement with high false positive but low false negative.” I blurted out in Chinese: “宁可错杀一千，不能漏掉一个 (Better to kill a thousand innocents than let one guilty escape).”
10:00 PM, class ended. Went back, reorganized the summary, sent it to my advisor. 11:27 PM, got the advisor’s reply. I truly admire my supervisor. He’s department head and a leader, but never slacks on research. Very sharp at identifying problems. In his 50s, hardworking—works late every night. And he directly oversees our research, without a middle layer. What a contrast to domestic leaders/professors!
10:30 PM, started making slides, just in case I need to present at tomorrow morning’s group meeting.
12:15 AM, finished. Spent 20 minutes writing this blog post. Going back to wash up and sleep.
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Years from now, I’ll look back at this as an ordinary day during my Hong Kong studies. The last time I wrote this kind of流水账 (daily log) was in high school. I wonder if that log can still be found.