Cry or Smile

I never imagined that I would move to the United States eighteen months ago. Even now I still cannot believe this happened. Time flies really fast, but I still cannot forget that feeling when I first set foot on this land. I felt everything around me change, like language, festival, food, people, and especially the school education. I didn’t know whether I should cry, or I just should smile because I was about to begin a new life here.

Studying in my high school was the most unforgettable and the happiest time in my life. My thoughts return to eighteen months ago when I was a normal high school student in China. I lived in the school dormitory, and I was facing the most important challenge in my life, the University Entrance Examination. At that time, we did exercises in books from day to night, and took quizzes every day. We only slept six hours. I can’t forget how hard we needed to study in order to go to a good college; I also can’t forget how excited I was when I got good transcripts. I can’t forget how our classmates worked together and discussed the methods to solve questions. I can’t forget the scene that we help each other. That was the hardest but the happiest time in my life. In the United States, the education is much more relaxing to me because I just have classes about six hours, and then I can go home. That is much shorter than my high school in China. I cannot find that feeling about teamwork I had in China, but it has disappeared since I came here.

Sometimes having pressure is necessary to succeed. I usually heard that some people spoke highly of American education. They said there was less pressure on students. The teachers in school encouraged students to learn and to think by themselves. There is much more freedom. That is true, but without pressure, I felt no energy to study sometimes. In China, our teachers used to teach a lot, and then let us do a lot of exercises to help us to learn how to use the knowledge better to solve problems, so we usually had a lot of homework. Now I still like to learn that way. Maybe I am a little crazy, but I really think that education way before works because I know if you want to be successful, you need to put in a lot of efforts to reach that goal. No pain no gain.

Finally, life is much more competitive in China than in the United States. Maybe I like the education ways in China more than the education ways here, but the best part of the United States education is that there are more chances and choices, and it is much easier for students to go to college. No matter how bad your transcripts are or how old you are, if you want to go on studying, you still can enter college. Because there are more students in China, there is much more competition. Every college has very high admission standards in China; we need to study really hard to enter a good college. If you don’t have good transcripts or graduate from a pretty good college, it is hard to find a good job.

I felt strange about everything around at the beginning, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I know I had to lose something to start a new life. I cried in my room alone for several days because I missed my mother, my friends, and everything of mine in China, but now I realized that when I lose something, I don’t need to cry because I will gain something else. I can begin a new life, and I can do what I failed to do before. This means a second choice to me, I should not cry for the loss, but smile...