On September 1, 2018, the 2018 opening ceremony was held at the No. 1 Conference of the Library Building at Xipu Campus of SWJTU, with 223 undergraduate students and 65 graduate students presenting at the ceremony. The ceremony was presided over by Mr. Wang Junqi, Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee of School of Foreign Languages.

Dean of the school, Professor Li Chengjian; and Associate Deans which include Professor Yu Senlin, Professor Wang Pengfei, and Associate Professor Yang Anwen; Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee, Associate Professor Wang Junqi; Assistant to the Dean, Associate Professor Ren Xiankai, and the heads of departments attended the opening ceremony.

The opening ceremony kicked off by singing the solemn national anthem.

Firstly, all department heads welcomed freshmen in the language taught by the department respectively.

Secondly, Dean Li Chengjian delivered a speech, in which she briefly introduced the history of and achievements made by the school. Also, in the speech, Professor Li Chengjian expressed her wishes that both the staff and students of the school can take advantage of the national policies, say, the “Belt and Road Initiative” to strive for further progress; students take the initiative to broaden minds, keep up with the domestic and international trends; develop self-discipline, keep learning and get updated with the latest changes, and learn to deal with problems and correspond to difficulties, finally nurturing themselves a trend-setter in the circle of language-learning.

In the session of freshman representative speech, Zhang Zhuoran, the representative the class 2018, related in her speech and hoped that all freshmen could adjust mentality, set appropriate goals, work diligently rather than rest on vanity and fame. The speech was followed by the Video “Message from President Xi”, and the activity of reading family letters which all aimed at encouraging student to do good and do right and stay true to the mission of the party. Furthermore, the video “First impression” draw back students to the very start of their stories in SWJTU while the video “Wishes from Senior Schoolmates”energized them to learn from their outstanding seniors in the forthcoming years. At last, in the "Future Mail" session, every freshman sent a letter to the one-year-later self.

The opening ceremony was successfully concluded by singing the school song of SWJTU.