Today I have my first TOEFL score published. It’s a score I’ve dreamt of but never thought about to achieve. R28 L30 S25 W24.
Not to show off or to say this is some kind of achievement, but I’ve gone through so much that I feel I have to write an article about it.
Everyone agrees that 2020 was a horrible year. Back to January, 2020, I was busying planning to start my application for US universities in the game field, while my parents decided to gift me a ride to Hainan, a place with great scenery, as a relaxation.
The TOEFL test scheduled, at that time, was in February, and we all know what came next. The test got cancelled because of the quarantine policy, and my journey was not particularly enjoyable. I wrote a longer article about that journey in Chinese on Bilibili, maybe later I’ll translate it and put it here. Long story short, I caught a flu right at the high point of the outbreak and was treated like a Covid infected personnel for a brief time (Because my elder sister just so happens to be from Wuhan and she’s with me during the ride), we all know how terrible that was.
But life had to continue, and it’s just February, most applications can be as late as October, I didn’t need to panick…Or at the time I thought so. Come on, how bad could it be? It’s 2020, not 1820.
It turned out to be, really, really bad. All my scheduled tests were cancelled, March through June. This time, I began to think that I was indeed in trouble. I panicked, and decided to find some backup plan.
Basically I made an emergency shift from “going all-in with master application” to “Okay maybe find a job and if the application really goes wrong then work for a few years”.
So yeah, I went crazy to find an internship, at the same time practice a full TOEFL test set each week to keep my hands warm. What’s even crazier, I have two Computer Graphic courses that I need to learn from home, and I took a remote GRE course. My Unreal Engine course was cancelled because the professor couldn’t enter China and he did not feel comfortable to remotely teach this class. – It’s unfortunate for him, but really lucky for me. If I took that course I’m sure I’d been dead by exhaustion.
After half a year of anxiety, depression and exhaustion, things began to look better for me. Shanghai managed to control the pandemic to an acceptable state so I returned to school, I accepted an intern offer from NetEase, and felt pretty confident for it with my newly acquired CG skills.
It worked out pretty well. After two not particularly easy months, I was awarded an SP offer from NetEase. That offer was a big surprise, it’s good enough to a point that I decided to postpone my application for two years. It’s said that this level is not often given to applicants without a master degree.
I had to admit I went through a period of full megalomaniac after that, but I guess it’s understandable? I depressed my teammates in the UI design course by pushing them too much. One of them even cried several times during meeting. Um… by now I’d say I feel pretty guilty, he was preparing application just like me at the time, and surely he was also stressful.
Ugh, I digress. Let’s return to application. In October I had a GRE test after the national holiday. I originally planned to review a little bit during holiday, but unfortunately I was taking Application of Cryptography at the time. The professor was a famous “nice guy” in the university as his course has a light workload. But for some reason I, and everyone else found his course pretty heavy. He got us a hard programming assignment for the holiday and whelp, there goes my practicing time for the GRE. The score was not bad, 151+167 is not phenomenal but enough. After an extremely hard final Cryptography exam many students went to question the professor why this course had changed so drastically, he answered, “Previously this course is mainly for master level students, now it’s all undergraduate class, I thought you guys and girls are younger so you can handle more heat?”
Okay, then why exactly my first TOEFL test was so delayed to a time that I almost graduated from school? The reason is simple, each year many students want to go abroad to learn, and due to the pandemic most of them got the test cancelled, so what did they do? They spent an absurd amount of money and book as many tests as they can. By the time I realized the fact (at about Nov. 2020), all available test centers before April 2021 were occupied! I don’t have 20,000 yuan to just throw at ETS at any time to book ten tests!
And that’s how I got to this point today, against all odds. To some extent, hard work did pay off, and shaped me even better.