寫在前面

Right now, I am brave enough to say, I have depression, but I am proud of my life. I graduated in advance from UCSD; I earned several As in graduate level organic chemistry courses; I had outstanding performance in research and volunteer activities. I smiled a lot every day and I developed the habit of regular check-up with my psychologist. It is not easy to deal with depression, but it is not impossible. I am proud of what I strived for myself. Even I know I am a small individual and has limited ability, I would like to try and devote all of my passion to this field. I can feel what you have been through and I am right now standing here talking about my experiences calmly, and I think you also can.

My father has long been suffering from Chronic Gastritis, and each time I accompanied him to take the gastroscopy, I couldn’t help crying when seeing how painful he was from his exaggerated facial expression and body language. My heart melted with pity for my poor father, “why abominable diseases intrude people’s life? Why our happy life being interrupted? Why we can’t radically defeat them?”

After graduation, I will embark on my long coveted automobile career, and Tesla Motors is my first ideal destination because of its well-known automatically-controlled automobile research. After about five years’ experience accumulation and expertise refinement, I hope to come back to China and dedicate my whole professional life to the development of Chinese automobile industry. Metropolises in China are suffering from excessive vehicle saturation and a nearly standstill traffic condition. For many times I’m wondering if I can make my due contribution to the settlement of this problem from vehicle itself. With sufficient localization, a car intelligent enough to choose the most efficient paths and reduce or completely avoid collisions might be a solution. In addition, traditional vehicle deprives the rights of the disabled, the old, and the unskilled ones to enjoy the fun of driving and the convenience it brings, while self-driving car might give them justice.

Starting from the beginning of 2016, I was hired by the Scripps Research Institute to deeply study dynein dynactin complex in Lander’s Lab. Dynien-dynaction complex has been studied for decades functionally, but it is studied structurally just recently thanks to the emergence of cryo-Electron microscope. Elucidating the structural organization of the subunits of the dynien-dynaction complex will help us understand how it is regulated to achieve progressive movement of cellular cargoes along the microtubules, and the goal of our research is exactly to structurally characterize the three dimensional architecture of the dynein-dynactin complex bound to microtubules using a combination of ultrastructural techniques including cry-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging. My major responsibility in the team was to use Etomo program to process and reconstruct the dynein dynactin complex from the raw data collected by electron microscope. Through a series of operations like extraction, subtomogram averaging, and docking, we finally obtained the 3D structure of the protein with better resolution. In this working process, I gained the opportunities to learn python programing language, EMAN and multivariate statistical analysis. I finally became expert in dealing with IMOD and Chimera (UCSF) programs.

I once read a thought-provoking story in the book Dreaming in Code. A battery of gifted computer scientists fought like monsters trapped in the mire of developing seemingly simple software, Chandler. The more they struggled, the deeper they fell in. Rather than the story itself, I am more interested in the methods and concepts mentioned. I concluded the four big questions attracted me in the story: Is open source spirit really helpful? How much will better back-end algorithms improve overall work efficiency? Why collaboration and presentation help products stand out? And what exactly is extreme programming?

Statement of Purpose

—— Ethnomusicology, my way of approaching the world and sharing my story

“Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding.”– Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

My affection for music carries me on whenever I'm going crazy balancing research papers, fieldworks, academic conferences, teaching and performing activities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It is exactly through those experiences that I realize the meanings of music, as Christopher Small suggests, lie not in objects, not in musical works, but in actions, in what people do. Such perceptions not only assist me understanding one’s behaviors and interpreting one’s culture through ethnomusicological studies, but also make me aware of the significance of training. 

Having studied finance for four years and worked full-time as a loan officer for more than half a year, I realize that the development of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are greatly constrained.

During my internship in the fixed-income department of China Everbright Securities, I first realized that numerous SMEs were experiencing financing constraints. Because of this experience, I continued to focus on this issue in my undergraduate thesis and I analyzed in depth to what extent the venture capital could help SMEs. Based on actual cases and empirical data analysis, I discovered that only a small portion of SMEs—usually high-tech enterprises—could be backed by venture-capital funds; however, these SMEs’ business performances did not improve significantly with the support from venture capital, which was totally contrary to expectations and hypotheses.

With a crystal-clear goal of heading to Wall Street bulge bracket after graduation, my school list “portfolio” was created with the basis of taking “whether or not the school is an investment bank target school” as a primary factor, and definitely Columbia University is my top choice. Frankly speaking, if admitted by the MS in Operations Research program in Columbia University, I would withdraw all the other programs’ applications because Columbia is my dream school. I prefer Columbia University than any others for the following reasons. Firstly…Secondly…blabla

The MSCF program in Carnegie Mellon has many advantages and can supplement my background in many aspects. First and foremost, in consideration of my pervious background is mainly in mathematics, and my programming skill is relatively weak compared with my strong mathematical modeling ability and relevant rich experience, my greatest aspiration from attending the MSCF program is to get my programming ability enhanced. While, of course I have the basis of learning programming languages. I have a good knowledge of R programming in statistical methods, attaining p-values in hypothesis tests by Monte Carlo Simulations and Bootstraps under categorical data and numerical data; I’ve taken Java courses for two quarters and I am able to have rigorous computational logics and exercised my brain to learn other languages such as C++ and Python more easily and faster. Apart from programming, the machine learning training is also an important attraction to me. As the top computer science school in the whole world, I have reason to believe CMU’s machine learning course would be very fantastic and cool in teaching regularized regression, bias-variance tradeoffs, and model validation and assessment.

Secondly, as a recent graduate with very limited working experience in the financial circle, I clearly understand how significant work experience is for me to start my career in America after graduation from MSCF. Thus, the Deutsche Bank Trading Competition and the nearly 100% secured summer internship opportunity MSCF program offers seem to be invaluable for me to get a better sense of the full-time position of my desired direction, helping me hit the ground running upon graduation.

Lastly, the curriculum of MSCF program is well-organized and I wish to choose to focus on asset management in my final semester to further narrow my focus down before entering into workplace.