Beijing college students are never too busy to go online

Surfing the Web, meeting friends and sleeping are top activities, survey finds

Surfing the Web, hanging out with friends and sleeping are the most important extracurricular activities for a typical Chinese university student in Beijing, a recent survey found.

According to China Youth Daily, the survey conducted by the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League collected a random sample of 8,231 students from Beijing's 91 universities.

According to the survey, a typical university student in Beijing is likely to spend more than two hours online every day. The most common extracurricular activities are surfing the Web, socializing with friends and sleeping. The typical student spends about 800 yuan ($130) to 1,600 yuan a month on average, and expects 6,668 yuan as their first monthly income after graduation.

Beijing has 814,300 enrolled university students. Huang Xuejia, from Beijing Foreign Studies University, is one of them. Huang said she spends about two to three hours on the Internet viewing friends' recent activities.

The survey found that 70 percent of students spend more than two hours online every day, 17.9 percent spend more than three hours and 13.1 percent spend more than five hours online.

Huang, who is majoring in language, has an intensive workload.

Studying the Serbian language requires her to spend about four to six hours a day practicing, besides attending regular classes and completing homework.

She has a more flexible schedule now. "I do translation work to practice my language ability," Huang added.

The survey found also that university students love sleep. Nearly 40 percent of university students spend their extracurricular time to sleep.

Tsinghua University student Gao Siji described her life as "going to class, attending student activities and sleeping".

"Sleep accounts for one third of my life, which is important," she said. "I like to sleep."

Wu Jianzhi, a sophomore from Beijing Language and Culture University, has a tight life schedule. Getting up at 7 am and attending classes from Monday to Friday, a quick lunch and break at noon, classes in the afternoon, a simple supper and going to the library till 10 pm, keeps Wu busy.

The survey also found that the average monthly expenditure of a Beijing university student is 1,481 yuan. More than half of the interviewees spend about 800 to 1,600 yuan per month, 21 percent spend less than 800 yuan and 14 percent spend from 1,600 to 2,400 yuan.

Contact the writers through luowangshu@chinadaily.com.cn