Letter from Beijing 2: Tsinghua University – #113

**Justin** (0:00)
So, I think many people outside of the academic system don't really understand the ratings.
It also has to be split between undergrad and graduate.
So, without a doubt, Tsinghua undergraduate students are the best in the world. I would say on average, much better than the best universities in the US. But this doesn't actually mean that the education quality itself is higher. It just means that the filtering is so good, they can filter better students. But then for graduate, still without a doubt, most of the frontier research is still in the US, although China is catching up very quickly. That's why we see that most of the PhD students in the US are actually Chinese, because they're high quality students.

**Steve Hsu** (0:59)
Welcome to Manifold. This is a special episode. We're here at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I have four guests in the room with me today. They are all Americans with some knowledge of this university. First, we have Han Feizi, who has been a guest before on the podcast. We'll link to that episode in the show notes. He is a resident of Beijing. He is a former baker and also a novelist.
He is going to be part of the conversation, but he is not the main focus of the conversation. Welcome to the show, Han Feizi. Hello, everyone.
The main guests today are three individuals who are actually part of Tsinghua University. First, we have Gabriel, who's an American and who is finishing his undergraduate degree here. Gabriel, say hi.

**Gabriel** (1:52)
Hello.

**Steve Hsu** (1:53)
Next, we have Justin, who did his undergraduate degree in the University of California system, but is doing a PhD here in AI-related research here at Tsinghua. Justin, say hi.

**Gabriel** (2:06)
Hi, everyone.

**Steve Hsu** (2:07)
Finally, we have Alex, who is a professor, also AI researcher, here at Tsinghua University. Alex, say hi. Hello. Okay. We're actually recording in a research seminar room at the Yao Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua, and Yao, as many of you physicists will know, it's the Yao of Calaba Yao manifolds, and he won the Fields Medal and is one of the great geometers in the history of mathematics.
We're borrowing a room in his research center right now. Acoustics, I think, might be less than ideal, but hopefully my engineers will fix this in post-production.
Gabriel, let's start with you. You are finishing your undergraduate degree here in computer science. Yes. Tell us about your journey to Tsinghua. Why are you at Tsinghua and not at a US university? How has your experience been here?

**Gabriel** (3:05)
To preface, I think it's important to say that I grew up in Hong Kong. I went to an international school in Hong Kong. And yeah, so most of my classmates, they went abroad to do university or to stay in Hong Kong. So the main option for Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, and the States.
I'm also applied to the States during my undergraduate application season.
In my opinion, it's been trending upwards that more people are considering Mainland universities. And my personal reasons were one, yeah, one aspect was I have never gotten education in Mainland and also language wise, I was much weaker in Mandarin. So I felt like not only is Tsinghua really good for the field I'm interested in, so computer science, but also another aspect of it would be, I would be able to learn about China as a system and just being in that new environment. And I think, yeah, now four years down the line, I definitely see that I got a lot out of my college degree.

**Steve Hsu** (4:16)
Let's start with the basic thing, your Mandarin language capability. So you probably studied it in high school, through the Hong Kong system. It sounds like you feel you weren't fully fluent when you went off to college.

**Gabriel** (4:28)
Definitely not. I studied it actually as a first language. I did the IB system, so International Veclurae. Technically got a bilingual diploma. We only kind of practice writing and reading, whereas spoken Mandarin, because the language in my school was just English.
I never really got the opportunity to really converse that much in Mandarin. That was lacking.

**Steve Hsu** (4:51)
How was the classes you were taking here in English or in Mandarin?

**Gabriel** (4:56)
When you say here in Tsinghua?

**Steve Hsu** (4:57)
Tsinghua.

**Gabriel** (4:58)
Yeah. All 95 percent of my class were Chinese. Mandarin.

**Steve Hsu** (5:02)
Was that a shock to you?

**Gabriel** (5:04)
Yeah. First year was pretty hard. That was one of the biggest challenges I faced, especially my first year. I realized later on that it wasn't nearly as big a problem as I thought, because your language skills improve a lot when you start using it daily, and I just never had that alcohol.