On February 25th, at the test center of Yubeilou Middle School in Tai ‘an, Shandong Province, candidates lined up to enter the examination room. Photo courtesy of vision china
On February 25th, the civil service examination in Guangdong Province was held in the examination room of Guangzhou Finance and Business Vocational and Technical School. Photo courtesy of vision china
(of a performer) hurry from one theatre to another
In the past few months, Liu Xiaohao couldn’t know his destination accurately. In order to get a regular job, this fresh graduate has taken seven exams since last December. He always knows where to go next when he is informed of the exam, so he is used to buying only tickets for the examination room, regardless of the later trip.
The most tense time was in the middle and late February of this year. In two weeks, Liu Xiaohao traveled to Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Beijing by high-speed train and plane to take four exams. There are still three exams, so he has to give up because of the time conflict.
On February 25th, 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 attraction of a prepared job is self-evident. Many people will "tour" the whole province or even the whole country to take the civil service examination and various career preparation examinations.
They are called "patrol examiners" and only when they are successfully admitted can they be considered as "ashore". One candidate said that he applied for 26 career positions in Hunan Province in half a year.
Because of the large number of applicants for many exams, the price of hotels around the examination room will increase exponentially before the exam. On weekdays, the price of a room just over 100 yuan will become two or three hundred yuan.
In order to save money, candidates need to book hotels as early as possible. Some people even predicted the scope of the examination room according to past experience before the examination was arranged, and selected different places nearby to book several rooms. If the final arrangement changes, then unsubscribe or transfer the unnecessary rooms.
When hotel prices really rise, some people will go to the guest house for 70 to 80 yuan a night to make do. Examinee Hu Shu once chose a guest house. Only after checking in did I find that the password lock on the old wooden door of the room had been slightly damaged. She didn’t dare to fall asleep, so she left the bathroom light on all night. On the way out to buy dinner, she was followed by a strange man.
In the Douban group of "Let’s go ashore for civil servants in the national examination and provincial examination", which was joined by 100,000 people, some netizens posted a message asking what means of transportation should be chosen for the first patrol exam. A candidate who went to Zhejiang for the patrol exam left a message, "The patrol party should be prepared to spend at least 500 yuan and 3,000 yuan for an exam."
Hu Shu graduated from a university in a coastal city in Shandong last year and has taken more than a dozen exams for civil servants and institutions. Among them, the written part, the qualification review part and the interview part of three exams are crossed. Just after attending the qualification review of the first exam, she received the notice of the third written exam and the second online interview. To this end, she had to travel from the northeast to the southwest of Shandong, between two cities 300 kilometers apart.
In order to control the cost, she only takes the train. Sometimes, sleeping for seven or eight hours is also beneficial, which can save one night’s accommodation.
A teacher of a training institution once mentioned in class that he saw an army of patrol exams and took as many recruitment exams as possible for civil servants and institutions across the country. Every year, the provincial exams in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai became their "pre-test simulation" in order to prepare for the final provincial exam in his hometown.
In 2023, more than 2.5 million people participated in the national examination, setting a record for the number of applicants in the past 10 years. For Liu Xiaohao, a fresh student, taking the civil service examination is only a part of his job search. Besides, he has to take the examination of public institutions.
The data shows that the number of college graduates in 2023 is expected to be 11.58 million. As a graduate student majoring in economics who is about to graduate from a 211 university in Beijing, Liu Xiaohao started the basic review stage of the civil service examination in the last summer vacation of the university and started his own job search.
He guarantees at least 12 hours of preparation time every day. Many people around him started taking the online exam in March and April. In order to save time, he finished the course at twice the speed.
However, none of the seven civil service examinations he took successfully landed.
He didn’t stop the exam tour. At present, his focus is on the exam tour of branches of China Tobacco, so he went to Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Yunnan and Hunan to take the recruitment exam.
At the same time, he did not give up other career preparation exams. On the 10th of last month, he received an exam notice from Zhengzhou two days later, when he had just finished an interview in Hangzhou. On the way, he completed an interview with a bank online, made two sets of real-life simulations by printing the admission ticket, and then flew to the examination room in Yunnan.
He is prepared to work hard until June this year. When he meets a good job opportunity, he will continue to fight for it. He doesn’t want to go to work and regret that he missed the opportunity of better development and better salary because he didn’t try.
For him, the intensive exam arrangement has become numb. "There are too many exams from small to large." In 2016, when Liu Xiaohao took the college entrance examination, 820,000 people in Henan took the exam with him. "For these (applicants), competition has actually become commonplace."
A person who collapsed in the examination room
For the examinees, arranging the itinerary is only the first step. When they go to the examination room, the test is the real beginning. In the written test against time, candidate Sun Yijing will leave the problem until the end. However, when taking part in a provincial examination in Jiangsu, when she skipped a series of questions, she found that she had no questions to do. Later, in an exam in her hometown of Shandong, she was so nervous that she had a double image when reading the test paper, and she kept sweating. As a result, it was the worst exam result in her job search.
She began to take the exam after graduating from undergraduate course. For the first time, she set off with her family at 6 am and drove to Lianyungang for the exam. Last time she was here, she and her family drove to see the sea.
That year, she had just passed the judicial examination and was waiting for the results of the postgraduate examination, and she didn’t take the civil service examination to heart. In the examination room, she first learned the specific questions of the civil service examination.
But at this time, she has 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 needs to keep running to courts and procuratorates to meet other people’s time.
That kind of busyness reminds her of her parents. Since she went to school, her mother has only attended one parent-teacher conference. The question of "Why hasn’t mom come back" runs through her whole childhood.
Going to a place with a stable work rhythm is a very important consideration in her career planning. She envied her sister who entered the interview after taking the national examination for the first time and went ashore after taking the provincial examination for the second time. She also heard that her brother who gave up his job and concentrated on taking the civil service recruitment examination did not go ashore for five or six years. Children from relatives around them, even when filling in their volunteers in the college entrance examination, began to consider which major is more conducive to the examination of civil servants.
The worst exam was to take a job that she really liked, working in the prefecture-level city in her hometown. Her body felt the pressure ahead of her heart. One month before preparing for the exam, in a quiet environment, she suddenly heard a noisy "drumming" sound, which was similar to the heartbeat. At first, she just thought there was something wrong with her ears, and she was not diagnosed as "nervous tinnitus" until after the examination.
Compared with the postgraduate exam, Qin Xue originally thought it was much easier to take the exam.
In July last year, after the second postgraduate entrance examination failed, she chose a new "track". She entered the interview the first time she took the exam.
On the interview list, she was the last one. Before she entered the examination room, she collapsed. Before the postgraduate entrance examination, her father would make a special trip to the school to accompany her in the exam, so she didn’t have to worry about oversleeping or forgetting to bring her admission ticket because of carelessness. She took the exam alone. On the first night of arriving in the examination room city, she cried and called home and used up all the tissues in the hotel room.
On the day of the exam, Qin Xue was so nervous that she vomited the wonton she had for breakfast when she was putting on makeup. Any trouble in the examination room will make her think more, and even the loud voice of the boys in the examination room will make her more and more nervous.
The last question, which she had never prepared, escaped from the crowd waiting at the door before she left the examination room and waited for the interview scores to be posted. She didn’t pass the interview, and this failure made her decadent at home for half a month.
Find the optimal solution
For examiners, popularity is not necessarily the best choice. Some people regard their hometown or a city that is convenient to go home as the destination of the exam tour, and they are no longer blindly pursuing first-tier cities.
Sun Yijing doesn’t want to be too far from home. She has been to many cities during the tour, but those places have hardly brought her freshness. Nowadays, online shopping can meet most of her living needs, while urban buildings are similar, "they all look the same" and "KFC is everywhere".
She also took the exam in Beijing, but she didn’t witness the prosperity of the capital. On the way to the hotel, she saw an old building with dripping pipes and broken buildings.
Liu Xiaohao gave up a good job in Beijing at the beginning of this year, focusing on the examination tour in Zhengzhou and second-tier cities with good development potential. The job he gave up had an annual salary of 200,000 yuan and a Beijing hukou, but he clearly knew that his ability and family conditions could not support him to settle down in Beijing.
Qin Xue will still focus on jobs in first-tier cities. She wants to pursue further studies, and the local college education resources are her important consideration.
Qin Xue always wanted to be a lawyer before her sophomore summer vacation. A summer camp to visit local law firms, courts and procuratorates changed her job search direction. In a well-known law firm, she found that luxury offices with high-rise buildings and beautiful rivers in TV dramas are not easily owned by ordinary people. More lawyers only have one desk, and rows of green plants add some life to the cubicle. She thought that in the bustling metropolis, herself on that small table was too insignificant.
Graduated from a famous university in the field of law, she only has a bachelor’s degree and has no rich internship experience in law firms and companies. She has no confidence in her competitiveness. "On the contrary, taking exams all the time can give me a little sense of stability."
Qin Xue occasionally thinks that if the postgraduate entrance examination is successful, he can better plan social practice and internship, make up for his previous regrets, and maybe have more choices in employment. But at present, for her, "Kao Gong is an optimal solution".
A victory
In the civil service examination, there is no methodology of absolute landing.
In the last interview without a leading group that she participated in in the Qin Xue Tour Examination, she fought a "defensive battle".
This interview form requires candidates to discuss and cooperate with others in a specific situation at the same time, and finally make the best plan to deal with the incident. Who can fully display individual talents and personality characteristics in a group of people will often stand out.
She ranked first in the written test, but for the sake of insurance, she didn’t show too much enthusiasm. She was worried that it would cause the examiner’s dissatisfaction. And Qin Xue, a classmate in an interview class, encountered another complicated situation. In the group, they appeared the role of "lever essence", while her classmates appeared as mediators, and stood up several times to solve the contradictions in the group, and finally won the first place in the interview.
After entering the interview for the fourth time, compared with the first time, Qin Xue was no longer afraid of being nervous. Every time she took the exam, she clearly remembered the real tension. Only by remembering this feeling can she learn how to overcome it.
After landing as a destination, candidates can only constantly improve their ability to get close to infinity.
Sun Yijing’s 13 rounds of civil service examinations have gone through her undergraduate and graduate career for five years. During graduate school, she will also force herself to take part in some competitions to exercise her interview ability. In the last few interviews, her scores have been rising steadily.
Through the examination tour again and again, she will remember every reflection in the memo: speak slowly, answer the work of contacting the grassroots, and say "first, second and third" will be more logical than "first, second and last" … … She is no longer the person who was called "timid as a mouse" by the training class teacher when she first started the interview.
Hu Shu continued to patrol the exam, and she expressed her confusion about taking the exam and applying for a job in Douban’s "Association of Mutual Comfort after Failure in the Exam" and "University Regrets Studying Accounting" groups. After more than 10 exams, she stopped blindly taking exams and made it clear that she would not choose some places.
Last month, after a year’s tour, Qin Xue finally landed in Guangdong Province. Recalling the first time she signed up for the public examination interview class was a rare happy time after her graduation.
During the two-year postgraduate exam, she closed her circle of friends and cut off unnecessary contact with the outside world. In the interview class, she met someone who resigned after working for several years to take the exam. A person who failed in the postgraduate entrance examination like her.
Because the postgraduate entrance examination has been unemployed, Qin Xue often has age anxiety. I don’t know that there are such a group of people. Looking at those who are older than themselves and have experienced more social experience, they look both light and serious. She feels that she has broadened her horizons and is still young, and her life should not be trapped by one exam after another.
At that time, the girl who shared a room with her was going to study abroad to improve her academic qualifications, and she continued to take the civil service exam after she came back. Qin Xue thought, if everyone finally chooses this road, there is nothing wrong with walking first.
(At the request of the interviewee, Hu Shu, Qin Xue and Sun Yijing are pseudonyms.)
Zhongqingbao Zhongqingwang Trainee Reporter Gong Ayuan Source: China Youth Daily
