Speech at USTC 2024 Alumni Reunion Commemoration

Nearly 5000 people attended the USTC 2024 Alumni Reunion, and about a quarter of our 2010 class from the School of the Gifted Young returned.

Respected leaders, teachers, and dear alumni:

Good afternoon, everyone! I am Li Bojie from Class 00 of the 2010 cohort. It is a great honor to speak as an alumni representative. In the blink of an eye, it has been ten years since we graduated with our bachelor’s degrees.

First of all, I want to express my most sincere gratitude to my alma mater. From 2010 to 2019, from undergraduate to master’s and doctorate, I met a group of outstanding classmates and alumni who are still my best friends and partners in entrepreneurship. During my Ph.D., Professor Tan from my wife’s lab invited me to give an academic report, and that’s how I met my wife.

I want to thank my alma mater for providing us with a solid foundation through its courses. USTC’s courses are known for their difficulty. I failed three courses, all foundational math and physics courses, and my GPA was less than 3.4. But even with my poor math and physics foundation, when communicating with students from other schools, they were still amazed at the depth of our professional courses. In our compiler theory course, we really had to write a compiler; in the computer architecture course, we had to design a CPU from scratch; and in the operating systems course, we had to develop a file system. For these core professional courses, I really wrote 3000 lines of code for each major project. Therefore, when I started doing research, my engineering implementation ability was relatively strong.

In addition to the courses, I also want to thank my alma mater for providing us with multifaceted support for our growth. In my freshman year, the technical department of the School of the Gifted Young’s student union was established, and the school helped us set up a hands-on lab and server cluster. We could build robots, learn 3D printing, and set up network services. I spent every day in the hands-on lab and computer room of the School of the Gifted Young. Initially, senior students and top classmates introduced me to the Linux system, and later, I also guided junior students in developing websites and maintaining servers. Since there was no internet in the undergraduate dormitories at that time, when the server had issues at night, I would carry my laptop to the School of the Gifted Young building, squat on the ground to use the Wi-Fi to fix the server, and then go back to the dormitory to sleep. This trained me to ensure the server’s stability to avoid getting up in the middle of the night to fix it. This morning, I went to the computer room of the School of the Gifted Young and saw the network cables and equipment labels I had put up more than ten years ago still there, and those servers were still running.

Starting in my sophomore year, I joined the school’s Linux User Association. The school’s network center provided us with resources, allowing us to maintain one of the largest open-source software mirrors in China, support us in developing a blog platform, virtual machine cloud service, and code hosting service used by thousands of students, as well as the USTC course evaluation community that many juniors and seniors use today. The Linux User Association gathered a group of USTC students with strong computer skills. I was also fortunate to meet these like-minded partners, do what I was truly interested in, and leave something useful for my fellow students. After joining Huawei, the scale of users I served increased by thousands of times, but many of the skills, especially the ability to complete a project from scratch, were accumulated at school.

In my junior year, I made my first entrepreneurial attempt with the Gewu Zhizhi Society. Several core members of the team later founded CIQTEK, a successful startup incubated by USTC. This experience made me feel that entrepreneurship was not so mysterious, and last year, I resolutely joined the AI entrepreneurship wave, hoping to explore new silicon-based life forms and achieve universal artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.

I want to thank USTC for providing excellent school-enterprise cooperation opportunities. In my junior year, my class advisor, Professor Huang, told me about a joint training program between USTC and Microsoft Research Asia, through which I was exposed to the world’s most advanced network and cloud computing technologies. Later, when I worked at Huawei, Huawei and USTC also established a joint laboratory, tackling many world-class problems through challenging projects.

I also want to thank USTC for cultivating our rigorous academic attitude. I remember many professors with graying hair still standing in front of the blackboard, writing notes word by word, and sternly but patiently correcting us when we made mistakes. My Ph.D. advisor, Professor Chen Enhong, told me that the purpose of scientific research is to distinguish the true from the false and pursue the truth. Professor Chen taught me many principles of scholarship and life, cultivated my research taste, and I will be eternally grateful to him.

The days at USTC are the most beautiful memories of my life. Before college, I could hardly take care of myself and was almost afraid to talk to strangers. But in the clubs, I had to interact with my classmates. I remember the first time I organized an event for the Linux User Association, I was too scared to call the restaurant to book a room, and I needed a classmate to accompany me to the print shop to make a poster. I even agonized over whether to buy a 1.5-yuan bottle of Nongfu Spring or a 1-yuan bottle of water. Campus life slowly helped me grow. I am grateful for the tolerance and encouragement from the school and my classmates.

In the ten years since graduation, no matter where I go, USTC people often have a special temperament that makes them stand out in a crowd. This is probably what is called “USTC spirit.” No matter what difficulties we encounter, the spirit of “Red and Expert, Integrating Theory with Practice” always guides us.

Finally, I would like to thank my alma mater again, thank the teachers, and thank everyone who has helped and supported us on our growth path. Let us all wish our alma mater a more glorious future and wish all the alumni present a prosperous career and a happy life!

Thank you, everyone!