Chinese Professor Calls For Graduates To Give Up DOTA

Chinese Professor Calls For Graduates To Give Up DOTA

Like school graduations in the US, Chinese graduations also have commencement speeches; speeches where possibly famous or respected people give a “pep” talk of sorts to inspire the new grads. In one university in China, the commencement speaker took to a slightly different route with his speech, to urge new grads to stop playing video games.

During this year’s commencement at Wuhan’s Huazhong University for Science and Technology in Hubei province, university president Li Peigen gave a commencement talk about growing up. In his speech, he told his 8000 graduates to “grow up and forget about school”, and, most importantly, to lose the attitude that life is a “game”.

Below is a translated excerpt of Li’s speech. Note: It’s very hard to translate Chinese poetry in English with it’s prose and imagery.

Li: “When you leave these halls, you must say good bye to dorms that don’t have air conditioning.
Say goodbye to the unbelievably cheap canteen that didn’t make one cent off of you.
Sleeping in is very sweet,
Playing DOTA is so very awesome,
Cutting classes feels so fine.
Choosing classes is a pain,
But life continues one,
You just have to say goodbye forever to this mentality that life is but a game.

One of the students at the commencement captured Li’s speech and posted it online. Tencent’s own reporting of the video has garnered over nine million views since the video surfaced this weekend.

Li, a professor of engineering with a name that sounds like bacon in Chinese, has been giving poetic commencement speeches to university graduates for the last three years. Every year’s topic has been different. This year’s speech caught the eye of the general public in China not because Li called out Defence Of The Ancients but for his interesting way of speaking to his graduates.

In video interviews with the graduating class of 2013, the students all seem very receptive of Li’s speech for them to grow up and work hard. However no one’s come out and said they’ll follow Li’s advice and stop playing DOTA.


[华中科大校长毕业演讲:告别DOTA 告别啃老] Sina


The Cheapest NBN 1000 Plans

Looking to bump up your internet connection and save a few bucks? Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


7 responses to “Chinese Professor Calls For Graduates To Give Up DOTA”