I took my previous level education in China. As we all know, eastern Asian countries generally value the importance of education. In China, because of the CEE (College Entrance Examination), high school is considered the most important and hardest part of a Chinese student study career. Due to imbalanced distribution of educational resources in different regions of China, students from developing areas, like me, have to study much harder than students from developed areas like those coastal provinces and cities where their economy flourishes. It basically makes a great difference between my studying in the Netherlands and my previous level of education.

·      Daily routine: This is probably the most obvious difference and I am sure a lot of people must have heard Chinese students complain about this. The hardest year of high school in China was the senior year. All books have been taught and what is going to come next are the several reviewing sessions to prepare for the CEE on year later. Thus, in my case, I had a tough schedule. I had to wake up at least 6:30 to dress up, clean myself, have breakfast and arrive at school at 7:05. I would have to suffer the consequence of being late even though most of time it was just formalism to emphasize the importance of discipline. Then we had a morning reading from 7:25 to 7:50. Then we started the first class for 40 minutes and had a 10-minute short break. After the second class, we had a so called morning-exercise, which was basically useless and not helping with our health. It was just another case of formalism in our education system. Then we had two more classes and one 30-minute self-study until 11:50. Then we went back home, ate and took a nap. In the summer, it started later, we need to arrive at 14:45 and started class at 15:00 until 18:15. Then we went and got some food for dinner. After that we went back school at 19:25 and self-studied until 22:00. Well we did have two breaks in between… and yeah we continue studying for a while… it was the key to win the competition

·      Competition: yeah this is the thing I have always been told ever since I arrived… People have been telling, well we don’t have competition in the Netherlands… yeah… lucky for you… we had it… in a pretty horrifying way… The funny thing is, before I thought the competition exists everywhere… At least I Know it does exist in the US, the UK and some other East Asian countries for sure. See, the thing is, we were always told to be the best as we can be. If you can work hard to be the No.1, don’t let yourself be the NO.2. Most student did not only care about the grades of themselves, but also others. Not to be helpful to each other but also to be aware the potential competition all the time, so that we could change our study strategies to win the competition. This kind of thing even happens between friends, but benign competition most of time… yeah I know it sounds crazy… As for scores, we just wanted to get an as much high score as we could so we could get a higher rank, which meat everything to us.