Objectively speaking, my undergraduate life was spent in sustained progress and the honors brought by my achievements. I have always congratulated myself on my modesty and my relentless perseverance which empowered me to strive for higher objectives. In retrospection, I feel that I deserve all the honors and awards that were conferred on me, be it the first scholarship upon entering the university or the undisputable award of the Most Outstanding Graduate of the Department with which I graduated from my beloved university. I am also delighted with my clear-minded understanding of myself, remembering the two important turning points in my life that happened during my most precious youth. The two achievements that I am going to describe may not be so spectacular in appearance as compared with my other honors, nevertheless they are significant in that they have charted the course of my future career.
I. The Publication of My First Academic Paper
My first academic achievement is an academic paper entitled Study of the Entrepreneurial Human Resource Capital in China's State-Owned Enterprises, which was published in The Socialism Study (No. 2, 2000, please refer to Appendix I). As an undergraduate, I felt really excited for being able to have an opportunity to present my true and unorthodox opinions in so influential a domestic academic journal. As the first major achievement, this event and its subsequent influence not only enabled me to deviate from mere coursework and embark on academic research, it also reinforced my determination to pursue scientific research as my career objective.
Essentially, my insatiable thirst for new knowledge constituted for me the fundamental starting point for conducting this research. Being a second-year undergraduate, I felt that my basic knowledge in economics and management had already equipped me to reflect on and to comprehend some of China's economic problems. As I was more interested in the field of management, the reform of China's state-owned enterprises naturally became the major concern of my analysis and contemplations. At that time, Chinese scholars were almost all devoted to heated controversies over the issue of the enterprise's share-holding reforms and the establishment of modern framework embodied in corporate management.
These controversies, which are still raging on, are primarily focused on the production domain. My belief was that the reform in the production sector would necessitate corresponding reforms in the system of distribution. Any society or enterprise that confines itself to the reform in the production sphere is incomplete or flawed. With the discovery of this problem, I commenced the difficult process of substantiating my arguments based on those research findings of mine.
Without exaggeration, only when I had started my academic research did I begin to experience the real challenges from myself, those challenges caused not only by the imperfections of my existing knowledge but also, more seriously, by the lack of effective methodology. I underwent a long period of painful meditation and constantly consulted my teachers in diverse disciplines for their perceptive comments on problems whose solutions were difficult for me to discover. In half a year, the number of books, journals, and academic papers that I consulted for undertaking my own research exceeded the total number of books that I read in two previous years. That was the most difficult and painstaking period for me. But this painstaking exploration was also very rewarding in that my perspective concerning China's economic problems was greatly sharpened and my training in academic thinking was all the more profound. A remark by a philosopher that "Without the spasm, history would never advance, not even a step" seemed quite aptly applicable to my case.
The valuable support from my Department, the instructions from my respectable teachers, and my own indefatigable persistence helped me surmount all the obstacles and contributed to make my research a rewarding success. Many facts proved the significance of my research. While feeling proud of my success, I had the profound feeling that, when it is so challenging for a student like me to switch from his coursework to formal research, it would be much more difficult for an enterprise or a nation to undertake its reform. The growth and the maturation of generations of young scholars will enable China's overall academic research to promote and to guide successful social reform. I would like to be one of such scholars under the conviction that the real joy of my life inhabits in what I believe to be my noble objectives.