She was simply resting her head on her hands and looking at me. I had assumed that at this time of night I would be the only student left in the nighttime reading room, as usual, but across from me I saw Dai Lin, a pretty girl from my class. One night, well after midnight, I lifted my head out of a thick partial differential equations text. Returning to my dorm room at one or two in the morning and hearing a roommate mumble his girlfriend’s name in his sleep was the only reminder I had of that other mode of life. Colorful collegiate life had nothing for me, and I had no interest in it. So I plunged into the library, spending most of my time on mathematics, E&M, and plasma physics, attending only the classes that involved those subjects and basically skipping all of the rest. I realized that I might have applied to the wrong major, and perhaps should have gone into physics instead of atmospheric science. Many of the things on it I had no need for, and some of the things that I did need-like Electricity and Magnetism and Plasma Physics-were not. Looking over the list of courses that would occupy me for the next four years, I felt a little disappointed. From now on, I would be a machine in pursuit of a single goal. Shutting the door to a now-empty house, I knew that I was leaving my childhood behind forever. Just five days before, I had taken care of everything in the house and set out for a southern city a thousand kilometers away to go to college.
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