The first three articles in this guide spent a lot of ink on how to pick schools, find jobs, and game the system. But in this article I want to talk about something different — let me start with a small story from when the UWC Survival Guide was first conceived.
Over spring break 2026, I met up in Boston with two close friends from high school, Dongyuan Li and E_P_silon. One evening as we were hanging out at the hotel, it suddenly occurred to me that earlier in the break I’d watched a YouTube interview with NYU computer science professor Saining Xie. In that interview, he mentioned that as an undergrad at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, there was a Survive SJTU Manual that he’d benefited a lot from. The thought struck me right then: why couldn’t we do something similar for the UWC community? That was the seed of this guide.
Back to that interview itself — honestly I don’t remember exactly how Saining Xie described the Survive SJTU Manual anymore, but I do remember he mentioned that a single line from it had moved him deeply: “(Our system always tends to summarize and measure a person with a single quantified score…) If a person treats the policy’s score as their highest pursuit, then they have become a victim of that policy.” This is the very thing I most want to talk about in this article, because the “always comparing” essence underneath that line generalizes to any metric: rankings, salary, the number of awards, the offers you collect, even the like counts and follower counts on LinkedIn or Instagram. These are all “policy scores” we end up chasing — but fundamentally, they are also forms of discipline the system imposes on us. Schools, teachers, parents, the peers around us — any of them can be part of the system, sweeping us forward along with it.
Honestly, I used to be exactly someone pulled around by these system-imposed disciplines. Many of the decisions I made at UWC — course selection, Zhixing picks, deciding which competitions to participate — were backed by the same implicit calculation: what does this look like on my college application? What impression will it leave on an admissions officer? After getting to college I really just kept running the same logic: GPA, research, internship offers… the metrics kept getting swapped out, but the “always comparing” logic never changed. Looking back now, I did get some results along the way, but I spent most of the time living in pain, confusion, and anxiety. At the end of the day, that anxiety came from the fact that I’d fully anchored my self-worth to a metric that came from outside of me, and because that metric was always changing, my sense of self-worth was permanently unstable.
Even now I won’t claim I’ve fully escaped the system’s shackles — it will probably be a fluctuating process. But I have actually started to stop spiraling over short-term wins and losses, and started to genuinely distinguish “things I care about” from “things I care about because of a metric.” That’s the reason I turned down some decent offers for summer 2026 and chose instead to do things I find more meaningful and more useful to my own growth — including this survival guide you’re reading right now.
But then again, there’s nothing actually wrong with a metric — it can even be valuable. If one person has ten thousand citations, then their work really is cited more than someone else with five thousand; that’s an objective fact. And in many cases it really does mean the former has more academic influence. But what that measures is always one of their accomplishments, not their worth as a person. It’s just that we always seem to unconsciously conflate the two. Over the years I’ve slowly come to feel that what really disciplines us was never the metric itself, but our default assumption that the metric carries signal: as if that number doesn’t just measure what it measures, but also signals how much we’re worth as a person. Yet a metric never carries that — we’re the ones who welded the “so I’m worth more” meaning onto it. That’s why the line — “if a person treats the policy’s score as their highest pursuit, then they have become a victim of that policy” — moved not just Saining Xie back then, but also me today. That’s also precisely the founding goal of the UWC Survival Guide: to help everyone play with the system without being swallowed by it.
In dedication to every UWC student also weathering the ups and downs of the system.