Dorms and dreamers

I have attended the China International College Students' "Internet +" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition four times.

Each time, I have been amazed by the scale of the competition, which keeps growing every year, and how talented and hardworking college students are.

Their projects cover everything from robots, helicopters, drones, fishing and agriculture to infrared intelligent computational imaging.

As someone who majored in English at undergraduate and postgraduate level, I often struggle to understand the projects. Therefore, every time I interviewed a student I first asked them to explain their work to me in the simplest way, but there were still times when I could not understand them.

In addition to the high-end, fancy projects, there are those aimed at improving people's lives, especially the less fortunate.

A Braille reader developed by a team from Chongqing University helps visually impaired people understand the wider world through reading.

Huang Zhou, an undergraduate at the university who leads the team, said the members were inspired to develop the device when they visited a local visually impaired couple as freshmen. The couple told them that reading books can be inconvenient and they wanted to read as easily as nondisabled people.

In response, the students developed a reader that can display 100 Braille words on a single page, and it is sold at a much cheaper price than comparable products on the market, Huang said.

"While visually impaired people can obtain information via aural input, such information is easily forgotten. Meanwhile, Braille books can be cumbersome and there just aren't enough of them, which is why our project is very significant," she said.

I think that starting one's own business must be extremely difficult, especially for college students who also have to study and may lack the required resources and connections that can make their businesses successful.

Many students I interviewed told me that they only slept a few hours a night, and in order to make their project better, they needed to spend many sleepless nights conducting experiments and trying to find investors.

However, such people are often highly innovative, and they can produce original ideas that can improve people's lives in different ways.

That is why the government and universities have offered students various favorable policies to help them turn their ideas into reality.

With the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24 reaching about 20 percent, innovation and entrepreneurship are good ways of boosting employment levels among college students.

After the eighth edition of the competition, many former contestants' projects have become successful businesses employing hundreds or even thousands of people.

One student told me that it is not difficult to maintain the pace once you actually start a business: what is difficult is for students to genuinely want to start a company.

Hopefully, as more get involved in the competition and entrepreneurship, the next major startups will come from students' dormitories.