The 3rd Celebration of Xinya College for WinterSolstice Concludes Successfully

On December 19, 2020, the 3rd Celebration of Xinya College for Winter Solstice opened at Xinya Building. As it’s believed thattheWinter Solstice is as important as the Spring Festival, all members of Xinya College will gather together for celebration at the weekend before the day and it has developed into an important tradition since 2018. And all surprising, heart-touching or indelible moments in the celebration will also be kept in mind as pieces of memories for all.

Temple fair

The temple fair kicked off at 9:00 in the morning.

Xinya Academic Association released a publicity notice to attract more students to set up stalls in the fair three weeks before the event.On the night before the temple fair, staff of the Academic Association were busy in decorating the entrance hall of Xinya Building and Xinya Library, and “stall keepers” from all grades and different associations also got ready and waited for their “customers”. When everyone was bustling about the preparation, the festival approached.

As the most popular part in the temple fair, “DIY Workshop” provided a platform for students to show their art skills attained during their attendance to the course "Art Enlightenment" and communicate with each other on their own understandings and feelings of the true and the good by means of various forms and carriers, such as fan painting, clay figure making, paper cutting, lantern making, glue-dropping art, poem creation, calligraphy and blending of colors which were delicate, ancient and elegant, solemn, casual and uninhibited. Students could either spend hours or even a whole morning in enjoying themselves in a single stall or visit different stalls and get close to the exquisiteness, vividness and brilliance of arts. In the fair, creators could be found here and there and they were focusing on using their own brushes or scissors to display their own world of art, which created harmony between the crowd flow and dedicated creators.

“Artists” working on creation attentively

In “Xin Ri Tavern”, the self-made snacks such asbingfen, a jelly-like dessert, sticky rice cakes as well as special handmade tea were available at extremely low prices, and students could enjoy alcoholic drinks "favored by beers deity Bacchus". The importance of the event didn’t lie in the flavor of the food or drinks but in the atmosphere of “celebration for the coming new year” created by the blending of strengths and styles.

Let’s assume that you could take the drink away from the stall of International Exchanges Association, visit other stalls and listen to the singers’ hard but clumsy singing from Xinya Orchestra’s “Voice of Winter” stall. After walking upstairs, you could watch rounds of chess games, join the crowds to propose your strategy but feel regret about the wrong move of the challenger. Finally, you could take a group photo with friends at “Changye Photo Studio” with coupons which you’d won from other stalls. Although there was no fixed core theme in the stall “Chang Zhi Xian Bu”, a certain kind of sound would caught you and draw your attention to join in the fun and games with others when you were passing by.

Xinya College Science and Technology Innovation Annual Symposium

Following the tradition created last year,the 2nd Xinya College Science and Technology Innovation Annual Symposium to which Xinya Science and Technology Association played the host was held at multifunctional reporting room on the afternoon oftheWinter Solstice.

At the event, students of multiple specialties such as electronics, computer science, economic management, CDIE and PPE were invited as speakers to make their reports. Besides, in additional on-site discussion, the speakers proposed in his or her report an open question as an introduction so that teachers and students on the scene could discuss the question and feed their ideas back to the speakers.

Yu Tianyu, majoring in Creative Design and Intelligent Engineering (CDIE), integrated his own hands-on experience and made his report titled “Thematic Sharing on Computing Manufacturing”, introducingthe research process, methods and prospects related to “computing manufacturing”.

By integrating the algorithm logic hidden in Wikipedia and Google, Wang Leijie, who was studying computer science, discussed “Fairness in AI” which triggered a heated discussion among teachers and students.

In his report titled “Do schoolmates matters?”, Wang Zihang, who was studying Economics and Finance, showed his research on “the significant impacts of students’ family background and social status on their own academic attainment” and other derivative problems with PISA’s partial data collected in Shanghai as his sample base and linear regression as his basic research method.

Majoring in Electronics, Chen Zonghao made a report on “Integration of Human Wisdom and Machine Intelligence — From Mathematical Perspective”. With a simple question about coin as an introduction, he drew “human wisdom” and “machine intelligence” as an analogy, expounded to the public the application of Bayes’ Theorem to machine learning and displayed his deduction and work about variation of function space in Bayesian Neural Networks.

Based on his major in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), Wen Jin shared with the public his research outline on "Exploration of 'Original Lu Xun'": FromYoshimi Takeuchi's to Toramaru Ito's Clues". Looking retrospectively to what Yoshimi Takeuchi and Toramaru Ito, the two generations of scholars, had worked on "Conversion" Theory to depict Lu Xun's ideology and his literariness, Wen Jin led to his topics of "the literariness of Lu Xun's works" and "the modern possibility of Lu Xun's works" and put forward his opinions on the research methods, paradigms, the framework of problem consciousness and other problems.

The symposium was also attended by Deputy Dean Cao Li, Form Teacher of Class 93 Zheng Jianhua, Assistant to the Dean Zhang Weite and other teachers, who also provided many instructive suggestions on the activity organization, reports and sharing for the students. Prof. Cao Li also affirmed that students of different specialties were making great efforts in displaying their works in an intelligible and interactive manner, and she also suggested that it’s necessary to extend the tentacles of academic exchanges so as to achieve more active engagement of students from different majors. According to Prof. Zheng Jianhua, it’s an interesting and funny experience to participate in multidisciplinary exchanges, and he also came up with some targeted suggestions on students’ sharing.

Winter Solstice dinner

Upon the conclusion of the symposium, ingredients were ready at Guan Chou Yuan Canteen for the upcoming Winter Solsticedinner. The dinner began with the dumpling feast which both teachers and students were looking forward to, and the feast officially kicked off after Dean Gan Yang announced the start of the event. Everyone was working hard in making the dumplings, rolling, stuffing and laughing. Among all participants, some were well-trained in terms of dumplings-making, some were from the north and were ambitious to make their dumplings as the standard, while others who were from the south wanted to show their own special dumplings. Despite that, everyone kept their sleeves up and intended to show their skills, especially students who were enrolled in 2020. As they participated in the feast for the first time, they got enthusiastic about the event.

Some dumplings were made in a delicate shape, while others looked so funny that all were making jokes at them. In the end, a “king of dumplings” was selected from each table, and the winners could receive not only the praise from teachers and admiration from classmates but also a present from Xinya Academic Association.

The serving of the dumplings also marked the commencement of performances. Xinya Orchestra performed a songTreasure as a warm-up, and the whole party climaxed on the later funny Q&A quiz under the perfect planning and organization of students from Literature and Art Department. The performance of adaptedRainbowChamber Singers’ What I Adore with new lyrics reminded students of their daily life and study in the college; and the dance performanceGee by counselors made a new impression on students.

Later, students were watching a video of best wishes from their families, which made them feel warm and laugh in tears. Despite of the short duration of only tens of seconds, the video delivered the most sincere concerns and care from their families, such as babbling and accented greeting from children at home, murmuring and missing from grandparents and, of course, parents’ rehearsal and funny special effects added to the video. The encouragement from home and all parts of the country touched the inner part of our hearts and encouraged us to draw strength from setbacks in life and begin anew.

Video of love and best wishes from students' families

Dean Gan Yang mentioned in his speech that Xinya College and all members had created our own “traditions” with the championship secured in “12.9” Singing Competition for four consecutive years. With the further development of Xinya College and its family, there would be more stories to create, more setbacks to learn from and more breakthroughs to achieve in the coming future. Of course, looking back from the spread of COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of the year to current unpredictable epidemic situation in the globe, it’s not easy for us all to gather together in the college and celebrate the Winter Solstice for the third year at the end of the year. Prof. Gan was in hope that we should value everything that was created by people whom we never met and take initiative to think about our membership in Tsinghua University and association with our country and the situation and the age which we were in.

Dean Gan Yang delivering a speech

OntheWinter Solstice eve, an article titledFive Students’ Stories in Xinya College in 2020 went viral in Xinya’s big family and it recorded the life and study of five students from different grades, including their carefulness when being in face of the unexpected, different reflections of thinking after their attendance to routine online courses, short-term and long-term objectives, fatigue and tiredness in front of failures and their persistent efforts in seeking for fun in life. In spite of our different life from theirs, it seemed that their stories still touched our hearts because of the collision of some emotions, feelings and understanding of life. The Winter Solstice this year brought us together and attempted to strike another greater chord that we took time out of our busy schedules to spend hours with our cherished teachers and friends to celebrate “the longest night in a year” and show respect to our friends who weremaking great efforts in life in sincerity. The precious moments in which “we found ourselves in gathering” enabled us to be aware of the significance of all memories, recalling, gathering and celebration.

TheWinter Solstice is not only the end of a year but also an important node of Yin and Yang movements, and its approaching on the same date reminds us to let go of the past and embrace the coming new year. There will be “new elements” in every year’s Winter Solstice celebration in Xinya College, but we will have the most feelings towards the most traditional activities and the simplest emotions after thinking carefully, which probably reminds us that we should look back to ourselves and the scattered emotions and moments that make up our life so as to explore the path and truth to the future when we are going to step into the next stage. Just as an old saying goes, the end of a year marks the beginning of the coming year.