There is exactly one year left before graduation, and my master's studies are gradually approaching their end. I started asking myself seriously: What do I actually want to do after graduation? Academia or industry? Which direction should I commit to?

This is an article written to myself. It may not be perfect, but it records the process by which I kept trying to understand myself, understand the world, and finally make a decision.

The toy cars of childhood and the desire to make things move

"If you cannot find your interests, think back to what you loved most as a child." That is still one of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard.

Before school age, my favorite toys were all kinds of little cars. Plastic ones, metal ones, sedans, vans, sports cars. I had many of them. Every day I would build tracks on the floor and let them slide down from higher ground, comparing which one ran faster, straighter, farther, and more steadily through turns. I could spend an entire afternoon immersed in these simple games and lose track of time completely.

After I entered primary school, my fascination with "vehicles" upgraded. I began making cars, airplanes, and boats from model-building materials. I moved from static models to spring-powered launchers, then to electric motors, and finally to remote-controlled designs. I tried to design structures myself and explore the properties of different materials. Some of those creations are still at home today, filling an entire wall like a private museum of childhood enthusiasm.

At that time, I loved building things, working with my hands, and above all watching something I had imagined actually come to life.

The turning point

Life, of course, does not move in a straight line. During the physical exam for high school entrance, I was told that I had a mild color-vision deficiency. It did not affect daily life, but it did restrict many majors I could apply to, including biochemistry, medicine, and architecture. That was when I first understood that not every path remained equally open.

For a while, I felt deeply lost. In high school I was doing well academically, especially in biology, and I had once imagined becoming a pharmaceutical scientist. But that idea was quickly pushed aside by reality.

During that period, I often spent lunchtime in the basement library at school, hiding among the science and engineering shelves and reading technical books almost nobody touched. I started encountering introductory material on computers, electronics, and automation, trying to recover some sense of direction.

When it came time to apply for university, I chose mathematics. Partly because it still interested me, and partly because it was one of the majors least restricted by my physical condition. That was how I entered the path of mathematics.

The fog: why did I still feel so far from the real world?

During my undergraduate years, I studied Information and Computing Science within the mathematics department. At one point I believed that learning algorithms would help me understand how modern technological products actually worked. But reality turned out to be different.

Most of what we learned was theoretical and rarely connected to concrete applications. Even courses that leaned toward practice, such as operations research, focused mainly on how to solve a well-posed mathematical model efficiently, not on how such a model emerged from a real-world problem, and certainly not on how a full system was built.

I accumulated more and more questions:

• How does a real problem become a mathematical model?
• Beyond the model itself, what technologies are needed to make a real product run?
• In a complete system, how much of the work is actually done by mathematics?

These questions left me in a kind of fog. Mathematics was still beautiful, but I began to doubt whether it was the destination I had really been looking for.

Exploration: trying to understand what I truly wanted to do

I was not willing to stop there. During graduate school, I kept sitting in on courses from other disciplines: simulation classes from engineering, chip design, video processing and intelligent vision systems, causal inference. I was trying to test the water in different directions and see which one genuinely moved me.

At the same time, I kept recalling a conversation from my senior undergraduate year. Back then, I had told a classmate that I was optimistic about smart homes, but not in the limited Internet-of-Things sense of controlling lights and curtains. What I really wanted was intelligent appliances and robots that could genuinely help people work.

At that time, it was only a vague thought. Now it has become much clearer.

The decision: I want to work on robotics

What truly made me decide was my recent systematic study of robotics-related technologies: ROS, path planning, motion control, sensor fusion, and more. Suddenly I realized that the numerical analysis, differential equations, and iterative algorithms I learned in computational mathematics were not wasted at all. They are in fact part of the foundation of robotic control systems.

So every step I have taken still matters.

To build a robot that is both agile and intelligent may require almost every kind of human wisdom. That is a goal I am willing to invest myself in.

Most robots today are still specialized, narrow, and largely dependent on predefined procedures. But the robots of the future should be able to adapt to environments continuously and possess genuine cognitive capability. That is the ambition of embodied intelligence. You can describe it as AI-driven robotics, or as AI with a body. I prefer to see it in a more personal way: as a childhood dream that never really disappeared.

I am still that child who loved to make things move. The only difference is that now I want them to move more intelligently.

Closing

I once wanted to become a pharmaceutical scientist. I once imagined becoming a researcher in the abstract sense. Then I moved into mathematics. Only now do I feel that I have finally found a direction that genuinely excites me and feels worth my effort.

This was not an easy decision, but I think I am finally ready.

I want to enter the robotics industry. I want to keep moving forward in this direction, keep learning, and keep building. Whether the road turns out to be winding or long, I hope it will prove worth walking.

贡献者: Junyuan He