Blog Post #4.1: Personal Statement (Edited)

My experience in life is one adventure where I set out to pursue my goals and aspirations. One of my guiding philosophies in life is to undertake ‘Human Revolution’ in my own life; to resolve and take concrete action to surmount my own limitation. With this principle in life, I took full responsibility of my life to seek ways to polish and to build my strong character.

Since three years ago, I set my long term goal towards the field of research in chemistry. Beginning with that goal in mind, I worked with my short term goals, avoided being result oriented and prioritized my work to develop my soft skills which would be important in the long run. This is one of the important soft skills I had learnt from my favorite book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey’. I saw how my life transformed from winning for myself to winning for others by taking my first step to be proactive in life; I recalled the vivid image of myself during my first year in university, boldly volunteered to work in my professor, Dr Lu Yixin’s research laboratory. I was determined to accept hardship and treated every session in the laboratory seriously, because every moment was an important step towards building my research foundation and to develop my interpersonal skills with my mentor and colleagues. The opportunity to work in a laboratory changed my perception of research as a job for hermit crab to one which requires tremendous amount of team dynamics.

My desire to explore the world to be my stage propelled me to apply for sponsored exchange program to University of Arizona. I was able to spend six months in Dr Victory J. Hruby’s research laboratory to engage in challenging research work to synthesize novel amino acid by developing novel synthesis pathway. Exploring into unknown pathways often lead to discouraging failures as it was extremely difficult to optimize the reaction condition for each synthesis pathways. But our dauntless mind and determined heart persisted, and eventually our team effort gained us sweet success in obtaining high amount of product yield and near perfect enantioselective chiral products. Despite my membership to Dr Hruby’s group was short, I was grateful to be respected as an asset to this team. This experience taught me the greatness of teamwork and perseverance.

To repay my gratitude to my country which gloomed me to be what I am today, I participated in various community services. Through this process of helping others to gain their own victory in life, I understood the importance of respecting people around me regardless of their social status. Being a trainer for numerous public performance, there were occasions when rehearsals and training with fifty participants twice a week became a chore. However, all the grateful words from my participants about how they benefited from all the past trainings at the end of every performance kept my heart burning with fresh determination. Thus, I learnt that being a trainer is not simply training others but it was a role to polish my own character and fulfill my ‘human revolution’.

An inspiring writer Dr Daisaku Ikeda once wrote, “No matter what kind of difficult situation one may find oneself in, some opening, some opportunity to fight one's way out, can always be found. What's most important is to hold fast to hope, to face the future with courage.” With hope and courage, I can overcome deadlocks in my life and open new frontiers in my research endeavours.