When It Comes to Picking a Major for the Gaokao, Family Background Matters More Than Interest

If your family is well-off, you can seriously consider following your interests rather than focusing on which major will make money. Your family doesn’t need the few thousand dollars a month you’d earn after graduation. You don’t need to rush into the starting line. Someone who has worked for ten or twenty years may not have saved as much as your family’s starting point—your background is better than theirs. You’re meant to inherit and grow the family legacy, not to carve out new territory or complete a family class leap. Without stirring things up, you won’t die.

It’s actually those from less privileged families who need to carefully calculate their choice of major.

You need to figure out exactly what you want to do—specifically, which industry you want to enter, which companies you want to join, or which public institution you want to work for—from day one. Do you want to be a programmer and join a big tech company, enter the power grid system, or take the exam for a certain sub-district office? You must have clarity by the second semester of senior year of high school. Make sure your parents look into the admission requirements for your target institution. Which schools and majors do big tech companies recruit from? Which schools and majors does the power grid recruit? What majors were accepted in previous years for sub-district offices and schools, and what qualifications are required to sit for the exam? The preparation before filling out college preferences is straightforward: parents should list out the admission criteria for the institutions their child might attend and lay them out in front of the child. Whatever they want, you cultivate. You must target your development specifically—choose schools and apply to undergraduate programs with that specific goal in mind, then apply to graduate programs accordingly. If the employer you’re targeting requires a master’s degree, look at what major they want, then see which undergraduate programs at which schools are most likely to get students admitted into that graduate program. Then you apply, follow the path step by step through grad school, and eventually enter that company.

This is like what the British princess said—she aspired since childhood to marry into the royal family, and for that day, she made countless preparations. Every encounter, every conversation, was the result of careful planning.

Nowadays, finding a job is this difficult, and finding a desirable job is this hard.

This decision will affect your entire life—marriage, settling down, having children, education, eldercare—all of it. If your first job is bad and your income is low, it’s like being knocked senseless by a stick right upon leaving the新手村 (starting village). After that, you tend to act recklessly—for example, pursuing a master’s degree without clear purpose, or blindly enrolling in graduate school, only to find it even harder to get a job afterward. You’ve wasted a few years, have no savings, missed out on good opportunities, gotten older, and it’s hard to find a partner. Then you’ll discover pressure coming at you from all sides: expensive rent, expensive education, expensive healthcare, and you’re close to 35, facing another round of layoff pressure once you hit 35.

All the problems later on trace back to the initial start.

A child can’t possibly be unable to choose. No one, using the method below, should take more than two days to pick.

Day one: stay in a cheap motel, eat steamed buns with pickled vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, read books for eight hours, and spend the rest of the time freely—you can play video games.

Day two: stay in a five-star hotel, eat lavish meals three times a day—abalone and lobster buffet, unlimited refills on drinks—from 8 am until 3 am, solving practice problems the whole time, timing your bathroom breaks. Throughout, there are random checks on your progress and constant scolding and verbal abuse.

On day three, ask your child: which one do you want? Money is hard to earn, and humiliation is hard to swallow—you’ve got to pick one. It’s a single-choice question.

Work backward. Figure out what the employer wants. If they want a square gourd, you wrap yourself in a square shell and spend the next seven years training yourself into a square gourd. A square gourd has a square development path; a triangular gourd has a triangular one.

The strategy is essentially backward mapping, followed by targeted cultivation.

Don’t think this approach is rigid. Every approach is based on your “game coins.”

Someone with one game coin has one game strategy; someone with a hundred game coins has a hundred strategies. There’s no absolutely best strategy—only strategies suited to the number of game coins you have. If you want unlimited possibilities, you need enough family resources to support them. If you want to explore the entire game, you need an endless supply of game coins to experiment with.

Translate your game coins into family assets.