When she was younger, English professor Yang Jia dreamed of being like characters in the books she read.

THE new year always brings an old problem for students who return to campus after a long winter holiday spent lounging around at home. As the spring semester begins, some students find themselves having to adapt to college life all over again - a process they refer to as "the holiday blues", or "post-holiday syndrome".

Time to get back to work, right? Well, not everyone is. Which brings us to our next major topic: The labor shortage.

Rising temperatures and drizzle may have pointed the way to a new spring and a new future, but the job status of many students is still uncertain. Still, they might want to take heart, because March is often called the “silver” job-hunting season.

Four Shanghai universities that included an English test in their independent admission examinations but chose to leave out Chinese have come under flak for giving "more importance to a foreign language".

She was awakened at 9 am by the alarm clock beside her bed and scrambled out of bed to head for her desk. She turned her computer on and began the day's online lesson.

MANY students, in their job search, are looking locally, but some, in contrast, are already thinking of flying across the continent or even overseas just for an internship.

A Chinese graduate's record-setting $8,888,888 donation to his school at Yale University has stirred wide debate at home. While some say it's up to Zhang Lei to do as he likes, others question why he didn't donate to his alma mater in Beijing.

WHEN finals week rolls around every semester, students line up in the wee hours of the morning to get a seat in the library. They leave books to occupy desks in classrooms. They keep their dorm room lamps burning all night long.

Mounting pressure from their studies and job-hunt have driven a number of students to find a "double" to attend class for them. This is especially common among juniors and seniors.

"Beating is a sign of affection, cursing is a sign of love."

Campus violence has been rising in Shanghai- the largest city of China, with blackmail, battles over lovers and escalating quarrels as the major causes, according to statistics from a local youth hotline.

Thousands of people holding chrysanthemum flowers went to the Jingzhou Memorial House to see off the teenagers, all 19-year-old students from the Yangtze University based in Jingzhou City.

The longest entry in the new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work that has been 44 years in the making, is for the word "immediately".

Over the weekend, 30 Japanese universities took part in the International Education Expo in Beijing. ROK, meanwhile, expects an influx of Chinese students, thanks to new exchanges between the two countries.