Since COVID-19 first appeared in 2020, Shanghai has held over 180 press conferences to inform the public of the latest situation. Have you ever watched them on TV?

If you have, then you’ve probably noticed that there is always a busy but silent man or woman on the right side of the screen. These people are sign language interpreters.Thanks to the team of seven, people with hearing loss can receive timely and accurate pandemic information.

The job is not easy. It’s a real test of one’s knowledge. During one press conference, Dr. Zhang Wenhong used a few medical terms. They were hard for ordinary people to understand. But Tang Wenyan, one of the interpreters, managed to communicate their meanings to people who cannot hear. “For cycle threshold, for example, I interpreted it as an important value,” she said. We need to make our interpretations as easy to understand as possible.

Tang has had 16 years of experience in sign language interpretation. The woman picked up sign language out of curiosity. Later, after discovering a serious shortage of sign language interpreters, she decided to build a career out of it. Tang admits that her job is tiring. However, she really wants to do her bit to make her city a better place. Behind the hard work, she says, is the wish to help people who cannot hear to overcome the difficulties they meet with in their lives.

Such efforts seem to be paying off. Tang and her colleagues have won lots of praise from the deaf community. More importantly, many people have become interested in sign language after watching their interpretations.

Perhaps one day you, too, can join the interpreters to become a “bridge” between the deaf community and the rest of society.

Many herbs and plants from nature can be used for dyeing (染色) your homemade soaps. It depends on the kind of soap and the kind of colorant (染色剂) you’re using. Here, we’ll talk about how to use color in each of the soap making techniques.

When you’re working with cold-process soap, a number of colorants will fade, change, or disappear altogether due to their reaction to active lye (碱液). Natural plant colors will be taken off except for a few stable examples. Certain food colorants will change color entirely.

In the hot-process techniques, you can add color after the soap is neutral (中性的), so you have more choices available than in cold process. You can often use fewer colorants, with more predictable results. Getting colorants distributed evenly in hot-process soap is difficult. When you add color at the end of the cooling period, you are trying to add it to a very thick, sticky mixture. Some of the soap has cooled into tiny pieces, while some of it is unstable enough to accept the colorants.

Experiment with different ways of incorporating color into hot process. One thing to try is to remove a small part of the mass you want to color, mix the colorant into that, and then mix the colored part back into the rest.

Nature provides us with beautiful colors that can be applied to coloring soap. You can add plant material directly to the soap mixture to create not only color but quality as well. Some plants remain their color when added at the end of the process. You can also use dried herbs in hand- milling products if you really want the color to stay for a while.

“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits (追求), and necessary to maintain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for,” said Robin Williams.

This describes my first-year self, who was buried in the study for high grades, and failed to seek the happiness found in everything else that college has to offer.

Like some people, I grew up with a family that valued academics over all else, who gave you a little extra love when you were doing great in your classes, and took it away when you didn’t. As a result, my self-worth became tied to my academic success. However, there is a difference between trying to always better yourself for yourself, and attempting to live up to certain expectations. We should all struggle to do the former, but unfortunately our minds have followed the latter.

For the past week, I have been going around campus, asking my friends what they wanted to get from college. Most of the answers I got were one word——money. Everyone who puts themselves through college sees it as a means to making a living in the future. While few are truly passionate about what they are studying.

However, we should all try to develop a long-sighted perspective on how we want to shape our lives. Do things with intent (意图), because everything you do now will have a hand in shaping who you turn out to be. Take some classes on topics that you’re really interested in learning about. Join clubs or work on projects and push you beyond your limits. Build a community. Surround yourself with people who challenge and excite you. And most of all, embrace the fact that failure and loss are sometimes necessary in life.

I promise you, when you look back at these four years, you will not remember the good grades or the bad grades, but you will hold in your memory the connections you made with people, the things that inspired you to create.