Rush
In the past few months, Mr. Liu has not been able to know exactly where he is going. In order to get a prepared job, the recent graduate took seven exams starting last December. He always receives temporary test notifications to know where to go next, so he is used to buying only tickets to the examination room, and does not think about the rest of the trip.
The most stressful time was in mid-to-late February this year, when Liu Xiaohao took a high-speed train and plane to Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Beijing for two weeks to take four exams. There were 2 more exams, and he had to give up because of time conflicts.
On February 2, he enrolled in the recruitment of civil servants in Henan, Guangdong and Shandong and the recruitment of Zhejiang Tobacco Company. In the end, he chose the provincial examination in his hometown of Henan.
In recent years, for many graduates, the attractiveness of a well-organized job is self-evident. Many people will "tour" the province and even the whole country to take the civil service examination and various career preparation examinations.
They are called "inspectors", and they are considered "ashore" only if they are successfully admitted. One candidate said that in six months, he applied for 26 career editing positions in Hunan Province.
Due to the large number of applicants for many exams, the price of hotels around the test room will increase exponentially before the test. For a room that just exceeds 100 yuan on weekdays, the price will become two or three hundred yuan.
To save money, candidates need to book hotels as early as possible. Some people even predict the range of test rooms based on past experience before the exam is scheduled, and choose different places nearby to book several rooms. If there is a change in the final arrangement, the unwanted room will be unsubscribed or transferred.
If the hotel price rises, someone will go to the guest house for 70 or 80 yuan a night. Candidate Hu Shu once chose a guest house. After checking in, I found that the combination lock on the old wooden door of the room had been slightly damaged. She did not dare to fall asleep and turned on the bathroom light all night. On her way out to buy dinner, she was followed by strange men.
In the Douban group of 10,<> people joining the "National Examination Provincial Examination Civil Servants Go Ashore", some netizens posted a post asking what means of transportation should be chosen for the first inspection examination, and a candidate who went to Zhejiang for the inspection left a message, "The inspection party is mentally prepared to spend at least <> and <>,<> for an exam."
Hu Shu graduated from a university in a coastal city in Shandong last year and has taken more than a dozen civil service and public institution exams. Among them, the written part, the qualification review part, and the interview part of the three examinations were crossed. As soon as she completed the qualification review of the first exam, she received the third written test and the second online interview. To do this, she had to travel from northeast to southwest in Shandong, between two cities 3 kilometers apart.
To control costs, she only takes trains. Sometimes, seven or eight hours of sleepers also have the benefit of saving a night of accommodation.
A teacher of a training institution once mentioned in class that he saw that there was an army of patrol examinations, as many as possible to participate in the recruitment examination of civil servants and public institutions in the country, and every year, the provincial examination in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai became their "pre-examination simulation" in order to prepare for the final provincial examination in their hometown.
In 2023, more than 250.10 million people will take the national examination, setting a record for the number of applicants in the past <> years. For Liu Xiaohao, a fresh graduate, the civil service examination is only a part of his job search road, in addition, he also has to take the public institution examination.
Data shows that the size of college graduates in 2023 is expected to be 1158.211 million. As a master's degree student majoring in economics who is about to graduate from a <> university in Beijing, Liu Xiaohao began the basic review stage of the civil service examination in the last summer of the university and began his job search path.
He guarantees at least 12 hours a day to prepare for the exam. Many people around him began to take public online courses in March and April, and in order to save time, he completed the course twice as fast.
However, none of the seven civil service exams he took were successful.
He has not stopped his inspection, and now he focuses on the inspection of China Tobacco's branches, so he went to Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Yunnan and Hunan to take the recruitment examination.
At the same time, he did not give up on other career preparation exams. On the 10th of last month, he received an exam notice in Zhengzhou two days later, when he had just finished an interview in Hangzhou. On the way, he completed a bank interview online, used the gap between printing the admission ticket to do two sets of real question simulations, and then flew to the examination room in Yunnan.
He is ready to work until June this year. When he encounters good job opportunities, he will continue to fight, and he does not want to go to work and regret that he missed the opportunity to develop better and pay better because he did not try.
The intensive exam schedule has become numb for him, "there are too many exams from childhood to adulthood." In 2016, when Liu Xiaohao took the college entrance examination, 82,<> people in Henan took the exam with him. "Competition for these numbers is actually commonplace."
People who collapse in the exam room
For the inspector, arranging the itinerary is only the first step, and when you go to the examination room, the test is the real beginning. In the written test, candidate Sun Yijing will save the difficult problem for the end. But when she took a provincial exam in Jiangsu, when she skipped the questions one after another, she found that she had no questions to do. Later, during an exam in her hometown of Shandong, she was so nervous that she had double shadows when she looked at the test papers, and her body was in a cold sweat. As it turned out, it was her worst test score in her job search.
She started taking the public examination after graduating from her bachelor's degree, and for the first exam, she left with her family at 6 a.m. and drove to Lianyungang for the exam. The last time she went here, she and her family drove to see the sea.
That year, she had just passed the bar exam and was waiting for the results of the graduate exam, and did not take the civil service exam to heart. In the examination room, she learned for the first time the specific question types of the civil service examination.
But at this time, she had strengthened her determination to take the exam. In July of that year, she went to the law firm as an intern and saw the busyness there, as well as the competition and pressure among colleagues. Moreover, her work requires constantly running to places such as courts and prosecutors' offices to cooperate with other people's time.
That busyness reminded her of her parents. Since she went to school, her mother has only attended one parent-teacher conference, and the question "why hasn't mom come back" has continued throughout her childhood.
Going to a place with a steady pace of work is a very important consideration in her career planning. She envied her sister, who entered the interview for the first time she took the national examination after graduating from her undergraduate and went ashore in the second provincial examination, and she also heard that her brother, who gave up her job to focus on taking the civil service recruitment examination, has not been ashore for five or six years. The children of relatives around them even began to consider which major was more conducive to the civil service examination when filling out the college entrance examination.
The worst exam was to test for her favorite position, working in the prefecture-level city in her hometown. Her body sensed the pressure ahead of her heart. A month before preparing for the exam, she suddenly heard a noisy "knock knock" sound in a quiet environment, similar to the sound of a heartbeat. At first, she just thought that there was a problem with her ear, and it was not until the examination that she was diagnosed by doctors as "neurogenic tinnitus".
Compared with the postgraduate examination, Qin Xue originally thought that it was much easier to take the public examination.
Last July, after failing her second graduate school entrance examination, she chose a new "track". She entered the interview on her first official examination.
On the interview list, she was the last place, and before she entered the examination room, she broke down. When she was going to graduate school before, her father would make a special trip to school to accompany her to the exam, so she didn't have to worry about oversleeping or forgetting the admission ticket because she was careless. She took the exam alone. On her first night in the test room, she cried and called home, using up all the tissues in her hotel room.
On the day of the exam, because she was too nervous, Qin Xue spit out the wontons she ate for breakfast while wearing makeup. And any wind and grass in the examination room will make her think more, and even the loud voice of the boy in the examination room will make her more and more panicked.
The last question was a question she had never prepared for, and before she could walk out of the exam room and wait for the interview scores to be posted, she fled from the crowd waiting at the door. She failed the interview, and this failure left her degraded at home for half a month.
Find the optimal solution
For test tourers, popularity is not necessarily the best option. Some people have designated their hometown or convenient home city as the destination of the tour, and they have stopped blindly pursuing first-tier cities.
Sun Yijing didn't want to be too far from home. She had been to many cities on her tours, but those places hardly gave her a sense of novelty. Today, online shopping can meet most of her living needs, and the city buildings are similar, "they all look similar" and "there is KFC everywhere".
She also took the exam in Beijing, but she did not witness the bustle of the capital. On the way to the hotel, she saw old buildings with dripping pipes and dilapidated.
Liu Xiaohao gave up a good job in Beijing at the beginning of this year, focusing on patrolling Zhengzhou and second-tier cities with good development potential. The job he gave up earned 20,<> yuan a year and he had a Beijing hukou, but he knew that his own abilities and family conditions could not support him to settle down in Beijing.
Qin Xue will still focus on positions in first-tier cities. She wants to continue her education, and the local college education resources are an important consideration for her.
Before the summer vacation of her sophomore year, Qin Xue always wanted to be a lawyer. A summer camp to visit local law firms, courts, and prosecutors' offices made her change her job search. In a well-known law firm, she found that the luxurious office where you can see high-rise buildings and rivers in the TV series is not something that ordinary people can easily have. More lawyers only have one table, and rows of greenery add some life to the cubicle. She thought that in the bustling metropolis, she was too insignificant at that small table.
Graduated from a prestigious university in the field of law, she only has a bachelor's degree and does not have extensive internship experience in law firms and companies. She is not confident in her competitiveness, but "always taking exams can give me a little sense of stability."
Qin Xue occasionally wondered if she could better plan social practice and internship if she was successful in the postgraduate examination, make up for her previous regrets, and perhaps have more choices in employment. But at present, for her, "the entrance examination is the best solution".
A victory
In the civil service examination, there is no methodology for absolute landing.
In the last leaderless group interview that Qin Xue participated in during the patrol examination, she fought a "defense battle".
This interview format requires candidates to discuss and cooperate with others in a specific situation at the same time to make the best plan to deal with the event. Whoever can fully display their talents and personality traits in a group of people will often stand out.
She ranked first in the written test, and she did not act too aggressively to be on the safe side, fearing that it would cause dissatisfaction from the examiners. The classmates in the interview class with Qin Xue encountered another complicated situation, and the characters in the group appeared in their eyes as "bar masters", while her classmates appeared as mediators, stood up several times to solve the contradictions in the group, and finally achieved the first place in the interview.
After entering the interview for the fourth time, compared to the first time he fled, Qin Xue was no longer afraid of nervousness. She remembers the real tension of every time she took the exam. Only by remembering this feeling can she learn how to overcome it.
When going ashore as a destination, candidates can only constantly improve their ability to get infinitely closer.
Sun Yijing's 13 civil service inspections spanned five years and spanned her undergraduate and graduate careers. During graduate school, she would also force herself to participate in some competitions to hone her interview skills. In the last few interviews, her score has steadily risen.
Through repeated inspections, she will remember each reflection in the memo: speak slower, answer more about grassroots work, and say "first, second, third" will seem more logical than "first, second, last"... She is no longer the person who was called "timid as a mouse" by the teachers at the beginning of the interview.
Hu Shu is still continuing to patrol the exam, and she posted her confusion about the public entrance examination and job search in Douban's "Exam Failure Hanging Head and Comforting Each Other Federation" and "College Regret to Study Accounting" groups. After more than 10 exams, she no longer took the exam blindly, and it was clear that there were some places she would not choose.
Last month, after a year of inspection, Qin Xue finally landed in Guangdong Province as she wished. Recalling the first time she signed up for the official interview class, it was a rare happy time after she graduated.
During her two-year preparation for graduate exams, she closed her circle of friends and cut off unnecessary contact with the outside world. In the interview class, she met people who had resigned after working for a few years to take the public examination. People like her who failed graduate school.
Because the entrance examination has been unemployed, Qin Xue often has age anxiety, I don't know that there is such a group of people, looking at those who are older than themselves and have experienced more social experience, they look both light and windy, but also extremely serious. She feels that her horizons have broadened, she is still young, and her life should not be trapped by one exam after another.
The girl who lived in the same room with her at that time was planning to study abroad to improve her education, and after returning, she continued to take the civil service examination. Qin Xue thought that if everyone chose this path in the end, then there would be nothing wrong with going first.
(At the request of the interviewee, Hu Shu, Qin Xue, and Sun Yijing are pseudonyms)
Gong Ayuan, trainee reporter of China Youth Daily Source: China Youth Daily