It was a fruitful year, it was a tough year. It was a year full of readings, surveys, and presentations, it was a year filled with progress and innovations. It is said that learning about new media is a difficult process to follow a moving target, but the systematic training in this program equips us with theoretical and logical thinking skills to analyze technologies, products, and devices from communication, business, and users aspects. And in this process all the research methods, presentation experiences, and teamwork skills learnt have prepared me for a professional development in the field of user experience research. It is a lesson from this precious year that any detailed contents will be forgotten, but the way to think and solve problems will be renewed by practice. Never be afraid of the future, things will be getting brighter and clearer when you walk a long way to reach the goal.

I still remembered that in the first class we were asked about our plans for the future career. Some of my classmates had great passion in new media industry, and some aimed at academic research. Since we had different goals, we studied together and benefited greatly from each other. After a ‘tough’ year in this new media program, we have learned to navigate a rapidly changing media ecosystem by creatively using and integrating media and new technology. This program offers a solid grounding in both academic research and new media business, which provides us more flexibility for either further education or entering the workforce. No matter what we choose, I think that the most important thing is knowing exactly what we really want by using the knowledge we gained in this year.

This year’s study in CUHK is really important to me. The most important thing I learned here is to always keep my mind open and be patient. Before I came here, my knowledge about the Internet industry is limited, though I was planning to start my career in this field. Learning something new is not easy. Thanks to the intensive class projects and the patience of our teachers, gradually we learned how to design a research and do the analysis, how to find the useful things out of large amount of data, how to collaborate efficiently with others, and how to teach ourselves in the ever changing new media environment. You may get confused very often by new concepts, methods, data and many practical problems, but remember to keep an open mind and believe in new possibilities, you will get a lot of interesting experience and solid skills in this new field.

Compared with the relatively relaxed schedule in mainland China during my undergraduate, the study in this program is busy, burdened, and beneficial. I found that I really learned plenty of theoretical and practical knowledge about new media. One year before, I could not believe that I could conduct theoretical research, design a smartphone App, or write an English paper with thousands of words. It is fantastic to find myself grew up so much in just one year. And of course there were frustrations and pressures. However, after accomplishing every task, the feel of gaining knowledge is great.