In the Blink of an Eye: Reflections on My Time at Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology

The past is still vivid.

No feast lasts forever; in the end we each go our own way.

I. Beginnings

My undergraduate degree was finished here, at Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology.

The school sits in Yuci District, Jinzhong. Its predecessor was the College of Information and Business, founded in 2002 by North China Institute of Technology (today’s North University of China); when the parent institution was renamed, it became the Information and Business College of North University of China, and after relocations and a period of independent operation, the Ministry of Education approved its conversion in 2021 into an independent, privately run full-time undergraduate university under the name Shanxi Jinzhong Institute of Technology. From independent college to a name of its own, the school itself is only in its early twenties — about the same age I was when I arrived.

The campus covers over a thousand mu. The motto is 谨信博学，经世致用 — earnest and trustworthy, broadly learned; knowledge put to use in the world. Nearly seventeen thousand students, and more than a thousand full-time and part-time teachers. I studied Computer Science and Technology, in the School of Information Innovation and Big Data.

II. Internship and Graduation Project

March 1 — the final semester began, and from that day I started on my graduation project. On paper there was plenty of time: three months, more than enough. It only became clear once I started that a graduation project is never just “the project”.

Forms, signatures, submissions, reformatting, waiting for notices, replacing materials, signing again, submitting again — none of it is large, but it arrives at unpredictable intervals, every day, and the accumulation is a constant low-grade drain. Plenty of small things went wrong along the way: technical dead ends, back-and-forth in the process, and the various small mistakes that come from my own unreliable memory. I will not go through them one by one; many of the details have blurred by now.

It ran on until mid-June before it was finally finished, piece by piece. The good news is that the whole thing went smoothly — and much of the credit goes to my supervisor, Ms. Li. She was brought in from North University of China, but she was thoroughly responsible, and news travelled faster through her than through anything else: she passed on every notice and requirement the moment it came down. Information chains in private universities are sometimes less than smooth, and having a reliable teacher as a bridge saves an enormous amount of pointless anxiety and waiting.

When it was over, the school arranged graduation photos, and a group photo of the whole department. Standing in the ranks, I felt no particular swell of emotion — not out of any great nostalgia, nor any particular reluctance to part; it simply seemed that since I had made it to the end, having something to remember it by was a good thing.

III. The Last Night

the night of 17 June was my last night at the school. It was also the day I collected both certificates — the diploma and the degree. Two sheets of paper so light they seemed to weigh nothing, carrying the whole weight of more than seven hundred days and nights.

Once they were put away, I went back to the dormitory and took every book I had used down off the shelf into one pile: textbooks, printed slides, notebooks filled with handwriting, exam papers thumbed soft. Packing them up was, in its own way, packing up the traces I had left here. Squared off, tied, ready to be sold first thing in the morning.

Lying in bed, listening to the occasional trundle of a suitcase wheel and footsteps in the corridor, I felt oddly calm. Because from the moment I enrolled I knew: in the blink of an eye, it ends — and we part. Knowing the ending from the start means that when it actually arrives you are not thrown into a panic. Like a match whose final whistle you knew in advance: all that is left is to play well, and then walk off the pitch.

IV. Farewell

I woke up, and it was the morning of 18 June. No ceremony, no parting words. Hao Xinyu and I counted up the books from the whole dormitory and carried them to the recycling stall beside the south gate. Piled together they looked like a small paper mountain — every textbook the whole dormitory had collected. My share was weighed, priced, and sold for 15 yuan.

Those books had been carried back from the textbook office one by one, their covers new and smelling of ink, every one of them heavy. In the days here I turned them over countless times, marked them in every colour, stuffed them into a backpack, into a desk drawer, under a pillow — they were heavy time, heavy youth. And now all that weight came to an emptiness of regret. It was not the small, careless friction that morning between Hao Xinyu, Yuan Haonan and me that hollowed me out; what really did was the absurdity of the exchange: a road you laid out over seven hundred days, converted at the end into one shrivelled number.

Selling the books did not go smoothly. The whole dormitory’s books were being sold together, but Yuan Haonan had been away from school most of the time, and after several rounds of phone calls we still had not agreed on anything — he would not allow his books to be disposed of. The trouble was that the books had long since been mixed together, and there was no way to tell which was whose. So there was nothing for it but to crouch beside the stall and pick them out one by one. The sun was already fierce, hot on the back of my neck. I pulled his books out, restacked them, carried them up the stairs alone and put them back in the dormitory that had already been emptied. In that moment a kind of melancholy settled in that I could not name — you have already reached the end, and still you must tangle once more with these sheets of paper that finished their work long ago. Farewell is never the clean wave of a film; it is loose ends and scattered things, trailing all the unfinished human business behind it.

At noon I went to Tianyuan Canteen one last time. Straight to the knife-cut noodle window, one bowl, exactly as usual. The same cook, the same taste, and the same faded price list taped to the wall. In the days here I queued at this window more times than I could count — sometimes hungry straight out of class, sometimes drifting over on a weekend after sleeping until I woke on my own, sometimes alone, sometimes with classmates. The last bowl I ate facing Hao Xinyu.

The two of us talked in fragments — where we were going, what work we were looking for, when we might meet again. The steam off the noodles rose against my face and mixed with the heat outside, and for a moment it felt like no more than an ordinary lunch, as if there were still classes after it. But I knew that was not so. This was the last meal I would eat here as a student.

In the afternoon I went back and kept packing: toiletries, odds and ends, everything swept into bags. Half a bottle of shampoo left; earphone cables knotted into a knot that would not come undone; at the bottom of a drawer, a few milk-tea receipts and a coin that had fallen in at some unknown moment. Not one of these things was actually useful; I was simply in no state to sort, categorise and throw things away, so I swept the lot into bags and took them with me. When I was done, the dormitory was truly empty — six beds stripped to bare boards, six desks with nothing left on them, sunlight slanting in through the gap in the curtains, the air smelling of cleaning fluid and dust.

Afterwards, the class monitor and the others in the dormitory finished packing too. I stood in the corridor and watched them one by one drag their suitcases out through the door, wheels rumbling on the concrete, near and then far, disappearing around the corner. A wave, and an “I’m off” — and under that “I’m off” sat a sentence none of us said out loud: go now, and who knows when we meet again.

There was far too much to carry alone, so I went back to the second-hand stall by the south gate and rented a battered tin trolley for 10 yuan — the owner called it “a premium price”. I stacked everything I had packed onto it and pushed it from Student Dormitory Building No. 2 all the way to the south gate of Jinzhong Institute of Technology. That walk normally takes five minutes, but pushing a loaded trolley, wheels creaking on the concrete, every step stretched out. Teaching buildings, the library, the sports ground, the canteen went past one after another — every one of them a view I had walked hundreds of times, every one of them telling me goodbye without a sound.

By the time I reached the south gate the sun was already low. I had assumed I was the only one in the class still here — most of the graduates had gone. Then I turned a corner and saw Su Guanghui, Wei Weiyu and a few other classmates. “A crowd”, in this case, meant only the handful of them, but at that moment a few familiar faces were enough to make it feel less lonely. We stood at the gate and talked for a few minutes, and learned they had not left either. I imagine there were more than just them — someone else was probably in some corner of the campus at that very moment, saying a last goodbye to somebody. But that is a story for later.

That evening I took a taxi home alone. It happened to be my first ride on the Sunshine Chuxing app, so the new-user discount meant it cost almost nothing. The car pulled out of the gate, through the streets of Yuci District, onto the road home. The wind through the window carried the dry cool of a summer night on the Jinzhong plain, and I looked back once — the school sign at the south gate standing quietly in the dusk, exactly as it had every time I passed through it, no different at all.

V. Bewilderment

In that busy-ness of not knowing what I was busy with, my undergraduate years ended — hurriedly, carelessly.

No surprises. Everything was within expectation: classes, exams, internship, project, defence, certificates, photographs — each reached along a track already laid, with no unexpected scenery.

No regrets either. What should have been learned I learned properly; what should have been done I did steadily; every step I took part in, finished, and passed. So no regrets.

Only bewilderment. And melancholy.

Afterwards something sat heavy in me, a stone of no particular size, of no explainable origin, with no way out.

Perhaps it was everyone scattering to their own corners of the world — forty-five of us gathered in one classroom from different places, and after graduating we scattered back onto our separate tracks. The hardest thing in this world is not meeting, but meeting again. Many people, in this life, will truly never be seen again.

Or perhaps it was facing work and choices right away — with the diploma in hand, it finally sank in that the umbrella called “student” had been taken back, that from now on nobody would arrange your days for you by timetable, and every road would have to be walked on your own.

Or perhaps it was simply the reluctance of parting — however clearly your reason tells you that it all goes by in the blink of an eye, when the bell actually rings you still look back, wanting one more look at the people and things that have become so familiar.

Or perhaps it was other reasons, ones I will not spell out. Some things can only stay inside; said aloud they lose their flavour. Some feelings are only fit to be digested quietly late at night, not turned into sentences. Those who understand will understand.

VI. Closing

Computer Science and Technology, Class of 2026 · written after leaving campus