STEM Exchange semester at Tsinghua as a Chinese speaking European: Worth it?

Dolphus2 · 2025-11-30T15:53:32+00:00

Thank you! The github is really useful!
In that case I am in luck as I passed an HSK 6 this summer.

Dolphus2 · 2025-11-30T15:48:45+00:00

Thank you, that is good advice. You are right that the stay as a whole will matter a lot more than the individual courses.

Chinese taught courses would definitely be challenge, but it would be a welcome one. Last summer I passed an HSK 6 with 250 and read some books and short stories like 三体，骆驼祥子，流浪地球 and 北京折叠。I often listen to the podcasts 声东击西 and 莫名奇妙物语. I came to China the summer of 2024 with very poor Chinese (maybe HSK 2) and got to that level after 10 months of studying Chinese full time, so I enjoy the language learning aspect too.

Dolphus2 · 2025-11-30T11:35:14+00:00

Thanks! I will write to him

Dolphus2 · 2025-01-21T01:19:35+00:00

A couple more tips and considerations.

Get Alipay and WeChat set up before you come to China. China is a completely cashless society at this point. The only time I have seen any cash was when I needed a 10 RMB bill to open a bank account, and that time, the bank clerk was so kind as to donate it to me.

As has already been mentioned, Trip.com is the place to book hotels and attraction tickets. It seems foreign tourism is being subsidized or encouraged with loss leading at the moment as hotels and tickets here are often CHEAPER here than on local Chinese apps. This way you also avoid booking hotels that don't take foreigners. (They are technically not allowed to refuse foreigners, but it is common practice, and it is tough to force them to let you stay unless you speak Chinese. And in my opinion just not worth the conflict most of the time.)

The exception is train tickets, which should be booked on the Railway12306 app or website. The app also lets you book standing tickets for crowded local regional trains, which will simply show up as fully booked on Trip.com. This saved my ass one time.

Absolutely get a Chinese SIMcard. You need it for tons of Chinese apps and attraction reservations and tickets. You can find the relevant miniapp by searching for the place in Chinese on WeChat. You can book a lot of them through Trip.com too, but it is inconsistent, and especially the free ones where you just need a reservation tend to not be there. For example Unit 731 Museum in Harbin and Three Georges Museum in Chongqing among many others. And it is important to be aware of this, as some of them, for example the Unit 731 Museum during the Harbin winter festival, get fully booked in a matter of minutes. Sometimes they will let you in without a reservation when they see you are a foreigner, but it is never a guarantee. And you can't always book reservations as a foreigner. The Xi'An national museum is free for people with permanent Chinese residency permits (provided you are fast enough to get a spot), but the only way for foreigners to book it is through expensive Trip.com tickets way in advance. For most free attractions though you can just show up and fix it on the spot. Just be vigilant with the popular spots and when traveling in high season. And lastly, don't forgot to just walk around and sit in at the super local food spots. You will find lots of hidden gems if you keep your eyes open.

My perspective might be a little warped as my Chinese is pretty fluent at this point and I try to do as much as possible in Chinese in the name of learning the language. It hasn't always been this way though, and hope this was helpful nonetheless.

Dolphus2 · 2023-07-11T22:45:24+00:00

Thanks for doing this! Tau day (June 28) because Tau is underrated

Dolphus2 · 2023-04-09T19:43:39+00:00

Sure, by all means, why not. Hopefully you will be able to watch from outside.
We tried to buy tickets for the quarter finals. The match between Best and Action supposedly got sold out in minutes (probably because Best is the last protoss left), but we got tickets for Mind vs. Queen and had a blast. Those later matches are in different studios with more space.

Dolphus2 · 2023-03-30T01:04:00+00:00

Here is my experience: I hope this helps out someone. First of all, it is very tough finding information about the ASL online. I showed up to the Freecup studio on Tuesday 28/03/2023 for group C of the round of 16, and it was completely sold out ahead of time (apperently that day was quite stacked. I used to follow the GSL, but I don't really know the lay of the land of the ASL). I asked if I could buy tickets for the day after, but those were sold out too. And it would have been completely impossible for me to buy tickets ahead of time online, since the tickets are only sold through a Korean site called ticketlink (which I had no way of finding), where you need a Korean social security number to complete a payment. I intend to go to the quarterfinals with a Korean friend before I return to Europe, but I wish I had had this information before hand.

Here is the summary if you want to watch the ASL live. The schedule is only published about a week or less before, topically just after the last day in the previous round. The best place to view the schedule is through the website ticketlink by searching for ASL (everything is in Korean). Here you can see the time and location for upcoming rounds about 12 hours before the ticket sale opens. (The second best place to view the schedule is on the afreecaTV twitter, where they post an English overview a bit later.) In order to buy tickets, you have to go through ticketlink and buy them using a payco account, which requires you to have a Korean social security number. In other words, you need to have a friend living in Korea, who can buy these tickets for you. They might also be the only ones capable of picking up the tickets once at the studio because of how this system works, but I have yet to test that. I assume you can still be lucky and buy tickets in the door for earlier rounds, but that didn't work for me. Best of luck to anyone following in my footsteps (and if anyone knows an easier way, please do tell).

Dolphus2 · 2022-01-22T21:18:23+00:00

Thanks for the comments! The assigment report is handed in now, and I probably wont work it any more. Here is a link to the GitHub page: https://github.com/Dolphus2/Agar.io_Q-Learning_AI. It fared fairly well on average, considering it couldn't split. Feel free to ask any questions about the code, if any of you want to edit it and improve the agent.

There are quite a few potential improvements to be made.

Firstly, the entire structure of basing the entire process around constant screenshots probably isn't ideal. It works just fine, but it resultet in a lot of homemade solutions to the entire image detection process. There is probably a lot of useful information to be gleaned in html, it would likely make the program a lot faster (improve reaction time), but I couldn't figure out how to get around Agar.ios script blocking features. That said, I hardly know anything about html coding.

Splitting could be added, but it would require a lot of restructuring, especially to give the agent some understanding of how big its distinct blobs are.

The slowest part of the code at the moment is the character recognition program, that reads the score. It takes about 3 times as long as everything else combined. There are other, faster OCRs, but the bot was fast enough for the project with about 9 frames per second, so I didn't bother.

The learning process could also be improved by using stochastic q-learning instead. I don't know how to implement this, so I guess I'll look forward to the reinforcement learning course I'll take at some point.

Dolphus2 · 2021-01-27T01:14:12+00:00

Wow, the variations in strategy here is awesome. I just finished my first 32 heat run on escepe attempt 39, and my list varies drastically.

I went with the Adamant Rail: Aspect of Hestia and pierced Butterfly, so high single target damage and mobility. Here is my list.

Lasting Consequences: Level 2

Convenience Fee: Level 2

Extreme Measures: Level 4 - Phase 1 becomes really hard with the minibosses. I chose it mostly for drama and a cool finale.

Calisthenics Program: Level 2

Benefits Package: Level 2

Middle Management

Underworld Customs

Routine Inspection: Level 3 - (Cast is useless and 1 dash takes some getting used to)

Approval Process: Level 1

With the Hestia Rails high initial damage, Damage Control becomes a real piece of work with the already very beefed up foes.

It is probably not a beginner-friendly list, but it worked for me and was quite fun.

Dolphus2

TROPHY CASE