1 . I had a perfect childhood. _______ I saw was new, wonderful and exciting. I was _______ whether it was rainy or dry, whether it was hot or _______. I just wanted to _______ all the things around me.

But I can’t _______ time. When I reached my teens, I started to realize there was a different _______ of life. I no longer had enough time for little things－discovering a rainbow was not _______ , looking at a giraffe in the zoo was normal, and _______ a building with 50 floors was not amazing. A rainy day was a _______ day because the traffic was slow, and the first day of spring ________ me of aller­gies (过敏). Life moves on again. The first day of the month is not just the ________ of a new month; it’s the time to ________ bills. Going to the supermarket is a ________; it is not just fun walking around, looking for things and seeing the people around me.

Life is a ________ in which everyone has many obligations (责任), but if everyone tried to see life through the eyes of a child, I am sure that every day could be ________.

2 . Get a Thorough Understanding of Oneself

In all one’s life time, it is oneself that one spends the most time being with or dealing with.     1    

When you are going upwards in life you tend to overestimate yourself. It seems that everything you seek for is within your reach.     2     It’s likely that you think it wise for yourself to stay away from the outer world. Actually, to get a thorough understanding of oneself, you may as well keep the following tips in mind.

Gain a correct view of oneself. You may look forward hopefully to the future but be sure not to expect too much, for dreams can never be fully realized. You may be courageous to meet challenges but it should be clear to you where to direct your efforts.     3    

Self-appreciate. Whether you compare yourself to a high mountain or a small stone, you represent a state of nature.     4     If you earnestly (诚挚地) admire yourself, you’ll have a real sense of self-appreciation.

    5     In time of anger, do yourself a favor by releasing it in a quiet place so that you won’t be hurt by its flames; in time of sadness, do yourself a favor by sharing it with your friends so as to change a bad mood into a cheerful one; in time of tiredness, do yourself a favor by getting a good sleep.

Get a full control of one’s life. Then one will find one’s life full of color and flavor.

3 . There was a man playing the piano in a bar. He was a good piano player and always performed in this bar. People came in just to hear him play. But one night, a customer told him that he didn’t want to hear him just play the piano any more. He wanted him to sing a song.

The man said, “I don’t sing.”

But the customer was persistent. He told the bar manager, “I’m tired of listening to the piano. I want that man to sing!”

The manager shouted across the room, “If you want to get paid, sing a song. Our customers are asking you to sing!”

So he did. He sang a song. A piano player who had never sung in public did so for the first time. And everyone was surprised by his song — Mona Lisa. He got lots of applause (掌声) that night.

He had such a talent for singing, but he just had been sitting on his talent for the past years! If without such a chance, he may have lived the rest of his life as a no-name piano player in a no-name bar. However, now he had become one of the best-known singers in America.

You, too, have skills and abilities. Maybe your “talent” is not as great as the singer above, but it may be better than you think! And with effort, most skills can be improved. So, in your life, you should be brave enough to try doing different things and find out what talents you really have!

5 . In our living room, we have a bookshelf. We call it the “______ treasury” because any of our guests can take any book from it and ______ any book to it. Our home often hosts events with hundreds of different people passing through it. But no one ______ where the books come or go; it’s all based on trust.

These books are typically of the ______ types--from Jack Canfield’s Chicken Soup For the Soul, self-help books like Power of Now, to Romain Rolland’s The Biography of Celebrity. You can’ really be ______ what you’ll find on a particular day.

The other day, I ______ a red book. It stood out because it had special little white hearts on it and no title. I checked out Page one. It ______ a hand-written inscription (题词) in black ink:

I quickly opened up a ______ page in the book. I spotted a quote, with a crossed out word written in the seemingly ______ handwriting of elderly Grandma or Grandpa Burrowes. Then I couldn’t wait to explore the inside. ______, every page had a hand-written quote by DJ’s grandparents. It was a(n) ______ of Grandparents’ quotes going back over many years! They had given it to their grandson and now, DJ had given it to us. It was this gift that ______ all of us!

A couple of weeks back, DJ decided to leave America to go on an open-ended trip to China. Before leaving, he came for an ______ at our place, putting this book on the shelf without letting us know. He offered his silent ______ in this way for what he benefited from our sharing. We stood in ______ of the Burrowes for what they left us.

6 . Last year, I fell into a deep depression. It was caused by a car accident. I was in physical recovery from the accident and suddenly all of my old hurts started coming up. I found myself crying on the floor of my apartment.     1     I didn’t want to feel this way anymore.

Let’s pause for a moment. I don’t want you to bleed with me or to pity me. But I also don’t want to cover my reality. And the truth is, beneath the shiny photos you see on the Internet, I’m still a work in progress.     2     Like all of us, I’m doing the best I can and making the best choices I can. Back to the evening when I found myself lying on the floor.

What happened next? I started writing.

There was a TV show I absolutely loved. I started writing fan fiction. It provided a beautiful place of escape from the thoughts swimming in my head.     3     I started to feel like myself again.

After completing four-part fan fiction totaling around 12,000 words, I had an idea. I should write a novel to give a hand to those like me.

I continued writing, having no idea where it would lead. I didn’t know I would publish it but, after much resistance on my part I finally made the decision to publish the book under my own name. No pen name. No hiding on the deep bowels of the Internet.

And so here we are.     4     Sure, readers will enjoy the twists and turns. And I can see myself in the character.     5     I wrote it to help people. To give them a place to belong to. A place to talk about this fictional world. The very same thing that saved me last year.

If the story provides this to just one person, I’ve done my job.

7 . “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ” This is dedicated to my first-year self four years ago, who was addicted to getting good 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. As an international student, I sometimes felt our parents didn’t quite understand the heavy academic weight.

There is a difference between trying to always better yourself for yourself, and simply putting too much on your plate until you burn out from attempting to live up to certain expectations. We should all strive to do the former, but unfortunately our mindsets have been always wired to follow the latter.

I used to believe school killed the creative spirit inside all of us, but as I get older and further into my academic career, I find that it is we who make the choice to kill that creative spirit. I am definitely not saying that you should throw your GPA out of the window and go painting all day. However, we should all try to develop a long-sighted perspective on how we want to shape our lives. Take some classes on topics that you’re genuinely interested in learning about, not just passing. Join clubs or work on projects that resonate with you and push you beyond your boundaries. And most of all, accept the fact that failure and loss are sometimes inevitable 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 and the times you learned something special. And so I ask you now, what do you want to get out of college?