I have a chapter of my life that, unfortunately, produced nothing worth showing off.
We were a cross-department entrepreneurship team. The one who actually made it went straight to a startup as CTO after graduation. I was the other person responsible for tech — and I was purely riding coattails. I hope you'll read that as self-deprecation, not false modesty. I helped out with patent applications, "studied" the Patent Law, and got exposed to some of the more interesting technologies of those years.
I organized a 3D printing outreach roadshow and hands-on workshop for students.
I arrived an hour early to set up the projector, powered on a few FDM printers (student-team budget) to preheat them, and laid out pre-printed gear mechanisms, little trinkets, and phone stands on the table. Students crowded around the moment they walked in. The energy picked up fast.
I opened up a printer on the spot to show everyone the internals, explaining what the XYZ three-axis motion, stepper motors, hot end, nozzle, extruder, and heated bed each did. I sounded like I knew exactly what I was talking about — but inside I was nervous. That machine had broken down just two days earlier, and I had no idea if it would make it through the session. When we got to slicing software, I imported a model and let everyone see firsthand how layer height, infill rate, print speed, and support generation affected the result. Lower layer height, smoother surface, longer print time. Higher infill, stronger part, but more material and time. The students were especially drawn to this — they quickly realized it was the exact same logic of trade-offs they grappled with in engineering projects.
The workshop was the liveliest part. Everyone designed simple pieces together. Some made phone cases, some keychains, some club logos. And when the printers inevitably broke down, I seized the moment to explain the underlying principles, pretending it was all under control: if the first layer wouldn't stick, the build plate wasn't leveled — the gap between nozzle and plate should be about "the thickness of a sheet of paper." Warping at the corners was a tug-of-war between edge stress and cooling shrinkage; crank up the heated bed temperature. A mess of fine threads meant the retraction settings and nozzle temperature were off, causing stringing. A snap-fit that was too tight to assemble was a live demo of tolerance, clearance, and material shrinkage. So many abstract concepts — one machine failure taught more than ten minutes of lecturing ever could.
We shot the breeze while watching the nozzle trace layer after layer. One team mentioned their lab was short on camera mounts, so I told them to try modeling one right there on the spot.
This line of work, at its core, is about bluffing your way through with projects. But in between the bluffing, I did manage to do a few concrete things: built a school-enterprise "entrepreneurship incubation base," planned and ran pitch events and tech salons. A few companies with registered capital in the tens of millions moved in, and we even got covered by China News Network.
After the senior members graduated, team activities gradually wound down. I shifted to a part-time role and applied for a small space in the university library, where I ran a project called "Tranquil Tea Room." On paper it was still promoting the entrepreneurship base. In reality, it was my place to kick back with tea and make friends. I handled the décor, campus surveys, visitor reception, and helped manage the WeChat Official Account backend and survey data analysis.
The best part was occasionally running into a person or two with wonderfully weird minds. They weren't drinking tea — they were contemplating the universe. Every sentence in our conversations made you question your own existence, and sometimes I'd follow those strange trains of thought, extrapolating and designing, as if we were actually going to build the thing.
Without this entrepreneurship game, I would have graduated as just a boring person who knew a little bit of "life science" crossed with a little bit of "marine science." CET-6 (the national College English Test), NCRE Level 2 (the computer proficiency exam), and the grad school entrance exam — the classic triple stack of boring-college-student buffs, fully maxed out.