Commencement Address to the Class of 2026

by Fu Guo, President of BISTU

June 23, 2026

Members of the Class of 2026, respected faculty, families, and friends:

Good morning.

Today is commencement — a moment that, once a year, becomes a milestone for all of us, and most of all for you, the Class of 2026! Looking at all of you in your caps and gowns, I find myself thinking back to a photograph from your convocation four years ago. The look of uncertainty you wore then is gone now, replaced by something steadier — a quiet conviction about what comes next. Four years. From Xiaoying to Shahe campus. From early mornings in the lecture halls to long nights in the library. From the code that wouldn’t compile to the thesis that finally did. You have arrived. On behalf of Chairmanof the University Council, Prof. Xie Jiangling, and on behalf of the entire university community, let me be the first to say it plainly:congratulations. You made it.

Now, at occasions like this, there is a familiar script. We talk about success. We talk about dreams. We talk about the wider world waiting for you. But this morning, I’d like to speak with you about something that may not be easy, but is truly important:

What tends to arrive earlier than failure in a young person’s life is not setback. It is the quiet hold that “the right answer” has on our imagination.

Failure, frankly, is not the worst thing — and there is even something endearing about it. Failure shows you your edges. It builds something in you that nothing else can. But the search for “the right answer” is different. It tempts you to believe you already hold the map before you’ve even seen the territory. It lets you slip into autopilot before you’ve truly begun the journey. And here is the real danger: it can lead you to believe that life, like a multiple-choice exam, has a single optimal solution — if only you are rational enough, disciplined enough, relentless enough to find it.

Over the pastyears, I have watched many of you. Freshman year, chasing the GPA. Sophomore year, stacking the competitions. Junior year, locking in the internship. Senior year, polishing the résumé. Our graduate students — you had your papers ready long before you ever needed them. Every step, precise. Every step, well-executed. You are, without question, one of the smartest, most driven, most capable generations this university has ever graduated.

But what I worry about is not that you aren’t excellent. What I worry about is this —that you may have learned to be excellent too early.Too early, you have learned how to win within the rules. Too early, you have learned how to use certainty as armor against doubt. Too early, you have trained yourselves into something efficient, frictionless, perfectly adapted to compete. That kind of preparation will take you far. But it can also leave a personvery good at proving themselves, and not yet very good at knowing themselves— very good at meeting the world’s expectations, and less and less sure of their own inner direction — someone who looks finished, when they are really just beginning.

The truth is, the questions that matter most in life don’t come with answer keys. What is worth giving your life to? What matters more than winning? When do you hold on, and when do you let go? What does success really look like — and what only looks like success? These are not questions anyone else can answer for you. Often, you’ll find that even the question itself is something you have to discover on your own.

And the world you are about to enter only makes this more urgent. We are living through a moment in whichanswers are becoming remarkably cheap. Search, generation, retrieval, recommendation — answers are everywhere, and they are nearly free. But this comes with a quiet new cost:

When answers become cheap, questions become precious.The people who will matter most in the years ahead are not simply those who can use the tools. They are the ones who can judge where the tools are taking us. Not simply those who can complete the task — but those who can rethink what the task should be. Not simply those who can answer the question on the page — but those who can name a question no one has thought to ask.

This is why, in recent years, our university has been rethinking how we teach and how we evaluate. Not because the “right answer” has no place — but because we have to be honest with ourselves:if education only rewards the quick, the accurate, and the well-formatted, we will graduate people beautifully prepared for yesterday’s world, and not the one they actually have to build.Education should not only make a person useful — it should make a person free.It should not only prepare you to do a job — it should keep you from being wholly defined by one. It should not only send you into the world — it should leave you, once you are in it, still capable of questioning that world, of correcting it, of imagining it differently.

Perhaps only after you have truly left campus will you come to understand more deeply what a precious freedom the university has given you: the freedom to try and fail, to hesitate, to change your mind, and, for a time, not to measure every passion by its return. As you step into the wider world, freedom and romance will not disappear. But they will carry greater weight. Freedom will need to be sustained by competence, discipline, and responsibility. And romance will no longer mean simply dreaming above reality; it will mean seeing the world clearly, and still choosing to believe, to love, and to create.

In that spirit, let me offer you five thoughts by way of parting counsel. Not advice, exactly, but five things I hope you will carry with you.

First — allow yourself to hesitate, and allow yourself to change your mind.

Don’t surrender yourself too early to someone else’s right answer. The “right path” that others describe to you is worth listening to. It is not worth mistaking for destiny. The detours you take, the plans you revise, the things you try and step away from — these are not wasted years. They are, very often, the years in which you actually become yourself.

Second — leave room for passion, responsibility, and conviction.

Yes, there will always be competition. But life is not only competition. There is also passion, friendship, dignity, and many things that cannot be measured simply in terms of winning and losing. Make room for them. For a quiet and enduring love, and a responsibility you are willing to shoulder, often reveal more about who you are than any passing gain or loss.

Third — do not be confined by a single label, or trapped within one small corner of the world.

A résumé can helpopen doors. But don’t live your life as one, and certainly don’t let it tell you who you are once you walk through them. Your major, your position, your town, your institution, your income: all of these matter, of course. But they can only describe where you are; they cannot determine who you are. Labels may help others recognize you, but they cannot complete the work of becoming yourself. A platform may give you a place to start with, but it should never become the boundary of your imagination.

Fourth — direction matters more than speed; cost matters more than outcome; and what is worthwhile matters more than what is merely useful.

This age will continue to reward those who are fast, steady, precise, and strong. It will also keep urging you to run ever faster. Just promise me you will pause, every so often, and ask:If I am moving so quickly, where am I really going? What price am I paying for this result? Beyond being useful, is this truly worth pursuing?

Fifth — preserve your ability to ask questions, and preserve your freedom to judge for yourself.

In the years ahead, you will encounter many confident answers — answers about success, about respectability, about what is supposed to be worth pursuing. Sometimes they will come from the times we live in, sometimes from the industries you enter, and sometimes from the expectations of people around you. But remember: the more fluently everyone else seems to be giving answers, the more important it is to leave yourself room to ask questions. Not in order to reject everything, but in order to be sure of one thing: whether this answer truly belongs to you.

Class of 2026,

The track is safe. But the open country is wider.

To graduate is to step out of a place where the questions had answers, and into a world that is more complicated than any classroom, more uncertain than any exam, and far more ambiguous than any rubric. Out there, some questions will have answers. Most will not. Some will reward efficiency. More will demand judgment. Some things can be calculated. The things that matter most — usually cannot. That is the open road. There are no signposts. There is no standard route. No one is going to tell you which way is correct. But that is exactly whyevery step you take out there will count.

Next year, our university will mark its 90th anniversary. For nearly nine decades — through war, through rebuilding, from the Beijing Institute of Mechanical Engineering, to the Beijing Institute of Information Engineering, to the Beijing Information Science and Technology University you know today — we have never walked a “standard route” either. Every renaming, every relocation, every reinvention was, in its own way, a journey into the unknown. So you are in good company. This university does not hope to send you out as “a typical BISTU graduate.” We hope to send you out asa BISTU graduate unlike any other.

So go. Not to become someone who is always right — but someone who stays clear-eyed. Not to become someone who always fits the world — but someone with the courage, when it matters, to tell the world it has it wrong. Not to chase every answer the world hands you — but tolive your own answerto the questions that actually matter.

Four years ago, you came to this university looking for answers. Today, I hope you leave it ready to findthe questions that are truly yours.

To the Class of 2026 — congratulations once again.

May you set out with skill — and travel with freedom. May you have the ability to answer. And may you have, more than anything,the quiet confidence not to answer everything too quickly.

Thank you.