The new term fell on Sep.15th, 2014. Both students and faculty members of Tongji University embraced their first day with fresh expectations for their study and work in the autumn term while saying goodbye to the long summer vacation. The neat campus looked vibrant with students coming and going with gentle breeze blowing on their faces. Students returned to their classrooms full of new dreams for their future and sparked their class discussions with exciting ideas and concepts. Now let us focus on some shots by the camera of our journalists on the first day of the new term.

At 7:50am, students arrived at a classroom in the North Teaching Building well ahead of time, eagerly waiting for their first class of Linear Algebra to begin. Miss JIA, a student sitting in the first row of the classroom, spoke with confidence: “It is never easy to learn Linear Algebra, but I’ll try my best to distinguish myself in this course by the end of this term.”

At 8:00am, while the bell was ringing，a group of teaching administrators headed by Professor WU Jiang, vice president of the university, walked along the corridor of the North Teaching Building on an inspection tour to make sure that things were going on smoothly for each class.

At 8:45am, when the break time came following the ring of bell, students on the Chemical Thermodynamics course came right to the side of their teacher bombarding him with questions. This course was delivered in English and presented a challenge to junior students who were not used to exposure to English speaking environment. So everyone was anxious to turn to their teacher for help.

Mr. HE, a freshman from civil engineering, expressed his expectations for the new term, i.e. “to learn new knowledge and make new friends.”

Students who did not have classes were busy reading in libraries, classrooms and on lawns. As the old saying goes, “every minute counts”. Mr. LIU, a graduate from this university who worked full time was making preparations for his professional qualification test for civil engineers by the pond at Sanhaowu, a man-made landscape on campus. He said, “The academic atmosphere here is so profound that it is only here can I absorb myself in reading.”

At the beginning of the new term, people at Tongji were ready to make every effort to realize the dreams in their hearts.

Translated by May Language Studio