Carlos Daniel Ramos Arellano (凯骏), Class of 2022 of the Division of Computer Science, from Peru.
To be honest, I never thought I would end up pursuing my undergraduate studies in Asia, let alone China. Back to 2015, when I left my country for the first time and spent 3 weeks in Beijing, the time I spent there made me fall in love with the culture, language, and people. This experience widely opened my eyes. When I was in primary and secondary school, I used to dream of studying abroad. Therefore, after my trip to China, I started to take China into consideration. I had heard nothing about Tsinghua before, but after a few weeks in China I realized that Chinese universities had 2 names on the top: Tsinghua University and Peking University. Since China was the only country I’d been to, I decided to come back, maybe for 1 year or for the next 5.
After researching, I discovered Tsinghua was the best Chinese university for science and technology, especially for computer science, in which I am interested, has a good reputation worldwide. In March 2018, I attended the ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Competition) as a guest where I saw how Chinese universities defeated top schools from the US and participants around the world during this 6-hour competition, which was enough for me to realize how good these guys are in the computer science field. Additionally, most students representing American schools speak Chinese, which is a clear evidence of China’s fast growing AI and computer science industry along with the long-lasting support from the government. Consequently, I decided to pursue my studies here, surrounded by geniuses, top-level programmers and entrepreneurs. And I hope to learn as much as I can from them during my 4 years in Tsinghua.
I have had a great experience during my first semester and have growing expectations for what is coming. One of my favorite classes is Linear Algebra I by professor Yang, his energy makes you focus on the class for the entire 2-3 hours, and in this course, he doesn’t only teach linear algebra but differential equations, graph theory, probability, statistics, logic… I can only say it’s unbelievable the amount of knowledge I acquired in this class. Discrete Math taught by Ms. Ma was also very impressive. At the beginning I found pretty challenging as Chinese is not my mother tongue. But after the first lectures, I managed to get through and extremely enjoyed the course.
I consider myself really attracted to sports, especially soccer. Unfortunately, I got injured shortly after arriving in Tsinghua, which made me stop playing until now. However, in Tsinghua, there are sports events all the time, I enrolled my faculty’s soccer team and they are taking part in a competition, so I decided that when I get better I will definitely take the opportunity to jump on the pitch again.
In the meantime, I would suggest prospective students to choose Tsinghua not only because of the quality of its faculty but also for the great quality of the student community, since the knowledge you will gain here will not only be from lectures but also from discussing problems and solving challenging pieces of homework.
