August 24, 2023
It is time to say goodbye to Rochester. Though it has been almost a month since my defense passed, and my friends and I have partied, hugged, and said best wishes to our futures, a feeling of incredibility still ripples through my mind when I start typing down these words. I have stayed in this little city (compared to my hometown) for six years, have met, worked with, and hung around with many amazing people, have earned a degree, and now I am about to shift to the next stage in my life. Time flies, but when I look back into it, the clips of moments in the past two thousand days and nights just emerge and become explicit, reminding me of this memorable period of time in my life.
I became very sure that I would like to pursue a PhD degree in my undergraduate as I found out my interest in dealing with complicated and unprecedented tasks. However, I did not really figure out the exact research field I would like to work in even after I was admitted by the Institute of Optics and began to take courses here. I decided to study optics at University of Rochester because of its prestige and my background (I studied optics as well in my undergraduate), but which branch in the bewildering optics world should I choose? Knowing myself not mad at geometric optics and lens design helped to filter out a few options, yet there are still many left. I started to ‘interview’ the research groups I felt interested in. Some of them turned out to be not recruiting, while one of them seemed to be a good opportunity except that the final decision from the professor was suspended for a really long time. As the final date suggested by the program handbook, which I thought was a deadline, to find an advisor approached, I began to worry about that I might never find a research group I like and hasted to talk with the rest of the professors on my list when anxiously waiting for that decision, which eventually turned out to be an ‘I am sorry’.
The last professor I talked with was Jaime. Now I will say that the destiny hid the gold nugget for me at the very bottom of the pocket and covered it with pebbles (this is only a metaphor about the best personal match; the faculty in the Institute of Optics are all extraordinary), while I did not know that at the moment I told Jaime I may be interested in joining his group but were still waiting for someone else’s answer. (This is now the funniest part in the story, which we tell other people about how I joined the group.) We did not talk about research in our first meeting, as I was still considering another professor as the first choice (still waiting for that long decision). Instead, Jaime noticed my anxiousness, maybe even with a little bit despair, and he helped me calm down by explaining to me that the date in the handbook was not supposed to be a hard deadline and that I did not need to worry about being kicked out of the program. It is at this moment that I felt that this is a group in which I will never be helpless or struggle with research by myself and that I should probably choose it. I am very glad I made the correct decision.
The pursuit of a PhD degree is not trivial. Unexpected obstacles appear in research and life from time to time. I feel extremely blessed that I have been in a group in which everyone (Jaime and every group member) is always willing to listen to the difficulties other people run into and give a helping hand, a spirit passed down from the older generations to the new generations. We worked together in the office, in the lab, and in the cleanroom. We celebrate Thanksgiving all together every year as a real family (I am very grateful to Cecilia, Jaime’s wife, for cooking fascinating food for us and organizing all other awesome group events).
Traveling to Ithaca and fabricating our devices at Cornell University is probably the most challenging part of the research in our group. I am really lucky to have the most reliable and helpful comrades to work out the problems together, watch the running equipment when one needs some rest, and share the pleasure of finishing all the work. Without my dear group mates, I would probably never learn to enjoy doing fabrication, not to mention that I am going to continue doing it in my upcoming job with great enthusiasm.
The six years at University of Rochester have impacted my life in an unmatchable way. Thanks to being part of this amazing group and to the amazing people I have met here, I have grown from an undergraduate knowing little about academic research into a veteran able to handle (by myself or as part of a team) difficult and complicated projects. What’s more, I have turned from a somebody who spent most of the time in solitude into a person who is willing to and enjoys talking, collaborating, and hanging around with others, which I find way more delightful than the life I used to live. Genuinely, I appreciate this experience in which I found out what I would like to do for work in the future, hopefully in my life, and with which I prepared myself to be ready for it.
