Only there is a dream in your heart can you succeed; only there is dream in your heart can you work hard and strive for it, become diligent¹, confident and active for it, and then you will realize your dream and have a wonderful future!

At the second semester of my junior year, many students began to hit the books to prepare for the postgraduate² exam, and so did I. After many days and nights of hard work, I was recruited by the School of Foreign Languages at Sun Yat-sen University and became a postgraduate in Foreign Linguistics³ and Applied⁴ Linguistics.

I felt very excited about the new things all around as I first walked on the campus. The streets are lined with tall and straight palm trees and the verdant⁵ lawns can be seen here and there. What impressed me most is the lawn before the Huaishi Hall, smooth and broad, looking as if it could comfort and ease people’s pain and sadness.

At the registry, I was informed that my dormitory was on the ninth floor! Much delighted, I thought to myself: “It’s so high! And the scenery must be great!” I ran up to the room quickly and just couldn’t help taking a look. Yes, that’s it! The scene was so beautiful and my dormitory was absolutely the right place for sight-seeing just as I had imagined. I was totally struck by the beauty of the southern scenery. Seen on the balcony, a mass of flourishing foliage⁶ came to my eyes, and the tall hedges and the narrow footpath⁷ seemed to dispose me in the idyllic⁸ life depicted⁹ by the famous poet Tao Yuanming. To my greater joy, I met students on this campus from all over China and made acquaintance with them. Never did I have such kind of experience before.

Being intoxicated¹⁰ with the beautiful view, a week had passed and there came the classes. The teaching mode was a far cry from that in my undergraduate days. The professors would leave you more materials to read, give you more time to think and offer you more opportunities to display yourself. The most important part of each course was the making of presentations. I enjoy this program very much actually, in that I believe this provides me with more practical knowledge and promotes my interest in carrying out research. Of course, it’s not an easy task. It requires your painstaking¹¹ efforts and needs you to read a lot of books. And this is the essence of making presentations: learning from books and creating out of books. One presentation that still remains¹² fresh in my mind is the one about collegiate English education, because that was a great challenge for me at that moment. This program requires the originality¹³ as well as synthesizability. Our team members had nothing in our mind at all at the very beginning. Seeing that the other teams did a very excellent job, I just couldn’t take this challenge lying down. In succession to a series of consulting, designing and revising, we finally gave out one satisfied presentation. This experience made me fully¹⁴ realize the importance of teamwork.

Sun Yat-sen University adopts a two-year postgraduate education system. I spent the first academic year in the process of attending lectures, class discussions and making presentations, which put me on the right track for my future research. At the beginning of the second year, I began to prepare for my MA thesis proposal. The proposal is very complex, but since it is the first step of an excellent MA thesis, all of us were very cautious in selecting the topics. My proposal is about the relationship between accent and comprehension of English learners. It is an original as well as a very complicated topic. So far, I have conducted experiments and just began to analyze¹⁵ the data of the results. Although it is hard to tackle, I am confident to come over it and accomplish it successfully because I love this topic and it is the one I have always been looking for.

The postgraduate life is not wholly dry and dull, and it doesn’t mean reading books all day long as people usually imagine. Here you have plenty of time at your own disposal. I love traveling, and I often take on trips at weekends and in vacations, during which you can enjoy the picturesque¹⁶ landscape, widen your horizon, and mould your temperament¹⁷.

The life here is colorful and comfortable, but meanwhile it is also full of tension and competition. You must get ready for challenges at any moment. This, however, is also the home of inspiration. Seeing other students’ perfect presentations, with much admiration¹⁸ and more shame, you may gain the momentum¹⁹ to improve yourself and to catch up with them. The life here might be a little bit less active, but you can have more time to think about life. This is a place where you can master the research methods, and meet the real scholars. More importantly, you can comprehend here that the first step to study is to learn to be a man, a real man.

During my postgraduate life, I also found my Mr. Right, who deserves my love in the whole life. Actually, we are classmates for four years in the undergraduate life. He is a diligent and kind-hearted guy, and the students all like him. And for me, I admire him even more. We have the common tastes and interests and he is really a congenial companion to me. We help and encourage each other in our study and we have the same cause and life goals. I should thank God for letting us study in the same university, for offering us more chances to know each other, and for granting us such a holy love.

I still remember in one literature class when I was a senior, one foreign teacher asked us to write down our wishes in the next few years. I wrote three: to study at Sun Yat-sen University, to be a university teacher and to travel most parts of China. Now, I am making my dreams come true. Besides, I have a companion who can share weal and woe²⁰ with me in my whole life. All this renders me nothing but satisfaction and comfortableness.

Now I want to tell you: Only there is a dream in your heart can you succeed; only there is dream in your heart can you work hard and strive for it, become diligent, confident and active for it, and then you will realize your dream and have a wonderful future!