As most of you know, the first year of university is always the hardest to adapt to. The addition of taking care of yourself, making new friends, learning how to get around campus, and school can sometimes be too much to bear.

I would like to attend medical school after my four-year undergraduate. It is well-known that medical schools are very competitive and require extremely high marks. I had always known that I was meant for medical school and worked hard all throughout high school. I engaged in life sciences and knew that I wanted to do a double major in neuroscience (神经科学) and psychology, but of course, I wasn’t so fond of the preconditions to get to that stage. I had to take math and physics in my first year.

So after the choke I call the first term, I looked back on my grades and found that I had never seen numbers like this before. I really didn’t even think they were possible. I had heard that medical schools liked to see an upward trend, so I was discouraged and hurt, but tried not to think about it. Having your grades taken away from you when that was all you had was a huge thing I had to overcome — I defined my worth by how “smart” I was and getting past that mindset was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

After I saw my grades, I realized the mistake I made taking a bunch of unnecessarily challenging courses. At the end of my second term, my grades weren’t as high as I wanted them to be, but I accepted it. I knew that there were reasons for the differences between individuals, but I still saw a huge improvement in my marks from the first term. I had enjoyed my time in my second term and even though I wasn’t where I wanted to be, it had nothing to do with my place in the university. It was very eye-opening and taught me what I needed to do in order to achieve MY best — not what everyone else considered to be the best.

I’m now taking a summer school course and my marks are incredibly better than what I was getting during my first year of school. Though I had a rough start, I’m sure my lessons and new attitude will carry me much farther than just to medical school.

There’s another universe not far from land. It lacks buildings, trees, cars, cellphones and the Internet. Seemingly limitless water extends uninterruptedly in all directions. Civilization goes away, along with any sign of humanity. And it is why I’m really into sailing. I grew up around boats. My father liked sailing and built them. My older sister and I were stuffed into a car nearly every summer weekend until my late teens to make the trip from northeast Indiana to the south shore of Lake Erie in Ohio, where Talisman built by my father waited patiently through the week.

As a kid, I read the adventures of Robin Lee Graham, a traveller exploring the sea alone, in the pages of National Geographic and, later, in Graham's book, Dove. However, it wasn't until about 20 years ago, well into my adulthood, that I took up sailing in a serious way. I've made voyages in fair stormy and weather, on my own boats and those of my friends, and ranging from nearshore day sails to blue-water passages.

Still, I've made plenty of mistakes. While living in Asia, a sailing friend and I set off across the South China Sea and intended to get to Thailand, only to be pushed by a late-season typhoon that forced us to make landfall in Vietnam, glad to be alive.

Years later, my wife and I lived aboard our 37-foot ship, Symbiosis, while we saved enough to take a two-year leave from our jobs to journey down the U.S. Atlantic coast and through the Bahamas and the Caribbean. We visited many places that never see ships or airplanes and that are nearly impossible to reach anyway other than at the helm(舵柄) of a small boat. But boats are expensive and time-consuming. After returning from the Caribbean a few years ago, we decided to sell Symbiosis, resolving instead to sail only “other people's boats”. It didn't last, though. A few months ago, we found a good deal on a smaller sailboat—easier to maintain but still capable of some short offshore journeys. I think we'll name her Talisman.

In my own case, as a reporter for a local newspaper, I had more than my fair share of interesting and exciting tasks. These included interviewing famous actors like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, presidential candidates (候选人) Jimmy Carter and Henry Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., son of a former president, and a variety of other stars, too many to mention. There were many other highlights too. The fact is, reporting is a great job and remains so.

Despite the low income, reporters are the beneficiaries (受益者) of free tickets, drinks or dinners. This practice enables reporters to broaden their news sources which are important in covering the news, and also adds to the excitement of the job. The downside to accepting these “perks (好处)” is that it colors or influences the reporting of actual news stories, and on occasion it does, although hardly at all when hard news coverage is involved.

In the old days, reporters had very little special training but they certainly knew how to gather facts and present them in a logical way that could be easily understood by readers. Old-timers also had unique and different news sources from all sectors of society and were often seen spending nighttime hours in the local pub (酒馆) cultivating those contacts.

That is pretty much over today. For better or worse, news reporters live in a kind of “bubble”, and the newsroom is closed off to the general public. Reporters tend to deal strictly with official government spokespersons for their information, and they are not so free to accept a lunch with whomever they choose and tickets to events. The result is that the daily news pretty much sounds the same around the world, despite there being hundreds of major outlets reporting on the news.

The old days of cultivating sources, working around the clock, and relying on your own sources and instincts (直觉) to report the news are fun to remember. It was a life of daily excitement, perks, and very little pay. Yet, if I could go back and do it all again, I would.