Today is my first day back in China. I decided to write this blog post to reflect on and summarize the lessons I learned from my short PhD journey at UR, a leading research university in the United States. I am not sure whether I will ever return to the U.S. for another extended stay—say, longer than six months—so this feels like a good moment to record some of the differences I noticed between China and the United States as a Chinese student who has lived in both places. Since I am a PhD student, these reflections will focus mainly on academia.

Graduate education and academic life

Before saying anything else, I should clarify that I am mainly talking about graduate school rather than undergraduate education. Their goals and standards of evaluation are fundamentally different. With that disclaimer, let me begin.

I completed a three-year master's degree at a prestigious university in China. To be honest, it was a deeply unhappy experience. I cannot speak for every student in China; there are certainly graduate students who enjoy their programs and feel fulfilled by them. But I did not.

Why was it so difficult for me? I am the kind of student whose passion and self-motivation emerge only when I am working on something that genuinely inspires me. Yet the typical pattern of my life at the time was:

Receive an order from my supervisor → Finish the task on time → Report back to my supervisor

Even when I disliked the topic I was working on, I had little room to change direction. At times, I could hardly call it research; it felt more like assigned work. I did not feel like a master's student so much as an employee in a company run by my supervisor. A slightly ironic detail is that my supervisor really did start a company.

My passion became a source of pain. I had many ideas and many things I wanted to explore, while my “boss” wanted me to finish the assigned job on time and stop wandering into unrelated questions. For me, then, one important difference is the unequal relationship that can exist between supervisors and students. Many other problems follow from it.

At UR, I worked with a genuinely kind supervisor who respected his students' ideas and interests. He supported them in pursuing their own research directions, even when those directions were not especially interesting to him personally. His support motivated me to pursue my goals and made my work far more enjoyable. He created an environment in which research could actually happen.

This difference can be summarized, perhaps too simply, as follows: in China, students are often expected to work for their supervisors; in the U.S., students are more often encouraged to work with them. Of course, this does not describe every supervisor in either country. The reasons behind these different relationships are complicated and diverse, involving culture, institutional incentives, funding structures, social systems, and even legal protections.

The contrast also appears in work–life balance. Many graduate students have almost no life outside work, either because of pressure from their supervisors or because of their own ambition. The situation may become even more intense now that we have agents such as Codex and Claude Code: when we can work on many things at once, it becomes even harder to know when to stop. Trust me—I feel this deeply.

I do not want to blame everything on China. Traditional culture and social expectations often encourage Chinese people to work harder, and I have seen too many people whose lives consist almost entirely of work or study. Stories about achieving success through suffering are popular in both China and the United States, but parts of East Asian culture can amplify that narrative.

Many Chinese PhD students pursue a similar set of goals: a well-paid full-time or part-time job, more publications, and higher Google Scholar citation counts. Reaching those goals demands enormous effort, sometimes at the cost of having a life outside research. From my perspective, it is difficult—perhaps nearly impossible—to produce genuinely innovative, first-rate research under constant exhaustion, although I also agree that meaningful research is impossible without hard work. Worse still, pressure to achieve can tempt some people to look for questionable shortcuts.

Compared with the pace I was used to in China, life at UR felt calmer and slower. I am personally terrible at work–life balance. I have always believed in “work hard; play harder,” yet I am not very good at practicing it. Most of the responsibility is mine, but some of it comes from the social culture around me. China is still developing, and that reality can create a powerful feeling that we should—and must—work harder to catch up.

Cultural diversity and freedom

China has a long and rich history, which also means that we inherit many strong traditions. These traditions quietly shape our lives and establish invisible standards: get married at around twenty-six, have your first child at around thirty, and so on. It can feel as if an invisible plan or map has already been drawn for your life. If you do not follow it, you may feel pressure and self-doubt, and you may even be criticized by your parents or relatives. These expectations can make unconventional choices more difficult and discourage people from creating something new, because doing so means becoming the person who refuses to follow the implicit map.

In the United States, however, I encountered many people and ways of living that would once have seemed “strange” to me. The country has many immigrants, and they bring an extraordinary diversity of cultures into the same communities. Things that might initially be treated as unusual can gradually become normal and accepted.

I recently watched a podcast featuring a student who grew up in a poor province, attended university in Shanghai, and eventually earned a PhD at Stanford. He described the cultural shocks he experienced when moving first from his hometown to Shanghai and then from China to the United States. I felt exactly the same way.

When he moved to Shanghai, he felt depressed and frustrated because many of his classmates had abilities that extended far beyond studying, as well as a broader understanding of the world. Yet when he moved from China to the United States, he felt more comfortable and relaxed. He had greater freedom to try different things, and he felt that fewer people were judging him.

I believe one reason the United States has played such a leading role in the modern world is that people have considerable freedom to pursue their dreams, no matter how strange those dreams may appear to others. Ideally, no one else has the right to define what kind of life is legitimate. Freedom brings innovation—and some chaos. Order brings efficiency—and sometimes tedium.

But nothing is absolute. I am not saying that Americans always have more freedom than Chinese people. Many Chinese people enjoy comparable freedom and are brave enough to resist these implicit judgments. I am describing a tendency I personally felt, not a universal rule.

City layout and the natural environment

UR is short for the University of Rochester, located in Rochester, New York. Why mention that here? Because the United States contains very different ways of living. Some people live in large, dense cities such as New York City or Los Angeles, while others live in lower-density cities and suburban areas such as Rochester. My experience of Rochester's layout and natural environment therefore cannot represent the entire country.

Still, I loved Rochester's environment. I lived in a university apartment with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. The apartment was surrounded by trees and grass, and during the summer I enjoyed walking around after dinner without any particular destination. I imagined myself as Einstein wandering near the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. For a moment, I felt more like a scientist—lol.

Rochester also has several city and state parks. Having regular contact with nature seems deeply beneficial for both mental and physical health.

One thing that especially surprised me was how comfortable wild animals seemed around people. I saw squirrels, rabbits, and beavers near my apartment and across the university campus. Sometimes I could walk quite close to them before they moved away. In China, the wild animals I encountered would usually disappear the moment they noticed a person. Perhaps Americans simply have a better relationship with wildlife :). It is understandable that the situation differs in China: with so many people living in a limited amount of space, human activity inevitably reduces the room available to wild animals.

Many Americans also live in detached houses with front yards and backyards. In Chinese cities, most people live in commercial apartment buildings unless they are in much more suburban or rural areas. This is partly an economic issue, but population density matters just as much. Can you imagine 1.4 billion people all living in detached houses? I have not done the math, but I doubt China has enough land for that—lol.

These reflections are personal, incomplete, and shaped by a relatively short period of my life. Neither China nor the United States can be reduced to a few simple comparisons. Still, living in both places has helped me notice what I value: respect and equality in research, room for a life beyond work, the freedom to be unusual, and regular contact with nature. Now that I am back in China, I hope I can carry some of those values with me.