My Wechat public account is almost four years old now. You can find book reviews, walking experiences, and my thoughts about math problems here. I am Jim Chen, a freshman at USTC.  I choose the pseudonym Maverick because Maverick means "a person who does not behave or think like everyone else, but who has independent, unusual opinions," and that's who I am.

Why do I choose to write in English instead of writing it all in Chinese? There are two reasons. Firstly, I am really poor at Chinese I don't know how to use figurative language. I have read many more English books than Chinese books. The second reason is that English has its charms. If I wrote something improper, I can easily get over it by making excuses as "misunderstandings". Moreover, English is just better at explaining and reasoning than Chinese.

I had returned home two weeks before. I had expected the winter holiday to come for long. Now I found the holiday a little boring and myself lonely instead.

Life isn't all about cramming for tests. Cramming requires one's mind fully devoted to something. If cramming is all a person has been doing in his life, then that life isn't worthy.

After cramming, I feel kind of lost. I don't know what I want to do, what I should do after the final exam. When you cram for something, you do things you hate only for the results. Some people say that the results don't matter. However, in my opinion, the results do matter, because you're devoting all your time to something you don't care about, and the only thing you get is a mark. I felt confused——I don't want to do this anymore.

I think my classmates in high school are smart, humble, and hardworking. However, the students in "the school of the gifted young" are not truly gifted or hardworking. Some of them get in the university through college entrance exams and are not that young. They are also eighteen years old. Some of their faces are crumpled, like those living under great pressure for years. They look very stern and motionless.

I seriously oppose the idea of studying Electromagnetism or doing the Physics Experiment the next semester. It isn't because I don't like the subject or things like that. It is because the course is completely unrelated to my majors, while only by devoting all my time and efforts to studying physics can I get a decent score. I don't understand.

Some days ago, I went to Green City again. I don't know how many times I went there. It was around 4 pm. I saw some foreign students leaving their schools. When I went into a "Subway" for dinner in the shopping center at the intersection of Biyun road and Yunshan road, I noticed six boys and girls my age chatting. They are all foreign students. Well, the thing is, when I hear people chatting, I always want to join in with them, you know. But I am very timid, so I always ended up watching and listening to the conversation. They seemed to be relaxed, always hugging each other or doing intimidating things like that. I wonder about my classmates.

Now I am 16, about to turn 17. People consider this age very young and immature. I can't disagree with that, of course.

However, if you think the other way, 16 isn't young.

Just think about all those teenage characters in movies and novels. The extremely famous Harry Potter fought with Voldemort before he was sixteen. The protagonist in Twilight, Bella Swan, was seventeen when she met Edward and decided to be a vampire. Holden Caufield was only about sixteen when he dropped out of school and wandered out for days.

There is no doubt that there's some exaggeration in those books. But still, their lives are more exciting, or dangerous, maybe. Cramming for all those exams can't make my life interesting at all.

But my point is, teenagers should be doing what they liked. I see those around me are kind of miserable. They are forced to study. When parents leave them, they can't control themselves and play video games for days on end. They are also obseesed with some strange Japanese cartoon.

Tracing back, I found that I did not know what to do with my life since I left Smic School. In primary school, I was content with my life and able to do what I wanted to do and make it meaningful. However, since I entered middle school, I constantly face this great pressure of exams and had to always try to get a decent score.

So how should I spend my time wisely? Is getting good scores meaningful? If it is, then there is never a good enough score. You are never going to get contented. If two people compete with each other, there's always one person losing. There is always the majority of people who can't get a good result.

If good scores aren't meaningful, then this leads us to question what we should do. There has always a teacher or a parent saying that life can only be meaningful if you study hard. There's always the atmosphere among students to compete for better scores. But that's not our whole life.

Two of my interests are literature and number theory. Reading is a way of entertainment. In books, we know what others tend to be thinking. Literature can help us learn about the subtle relationship between people and complicated feelings. Number theory, well, I still haven't researched deep in that field.

I hope I can be myself in the future.