Mulan is available today at Disney Plus. The first time Mulan was produced as an American animated film) was in 1998, the same year as I was born. And the main actress Liu Yifei has been my idol for many years. We have the same hometown - Wuhan.
This year has been extremely crazy for me. I was back from Beijing to Wuhan for Chinese New Year. However, 2020 started with a night of no sleep instead of the traditional festival. During that night, I was writing my application essay to ESTEEM :) The lucky thing was I got accepeted later. But the happiness only lasted for a short time. Because my hometown was in lockdown due to COVID-19. The first half year of quarantine was tough. Even though we were free after a 76 days of quarantine, my suffering did not end. I went through an exclusively long journey: Wuhan -> Shanghai -> Phnom Penh (Cambodia) -> Soul (South Korea) -> New York, NY -> Chicago, IL -> South Bend, IN in order to go back to Notre Dame.
Now I am sitting in my room at Fischer Graduate Residents. This midnight is quiet and suitable for writing. It’s also a good time to look back and reflect on what I have done to get here (besides the phycial move). I do not have clear memories about my stories before 18. If there is anything, that must be problem sets and exams :) So I’ll start with my time in Beijing (since 2016 Summer).
I had a great ambition when I was a freshman. After more than 10 interview with different student organizations and departments of Students’ Union, I got 5 jobs. This is too overwheelming, so I only kept two similar jobs which was to work for the publicy of student activities. One was in the technology department of Students’ Union. Another one was in the news and media department of Student Clubs’ Union. I learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop, to make posters, banners and flyers. My final position was a Vice President, responsible for training and staffing new freshman kids. My job at student organization was merely a foreshadowing of my later professional development.
My determination for entrepreneurship was ignited early in 2017 Spring with the WIN (We Innovate Now) spirit of BUPT (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications). The BUPT WIN Innovation Center has been supporting university students’ innovative practice activities for twelve years, and some of these projects have been realized, attracting considerable venture capital. I attended the National Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition twice for entrepreneurship. In my team’s first attempt, we put up drones to inspect and supervise tasks in building construction. I led a five-member group in assembling a drone that could be programmed to fly in a pre-set routine. We tested the drone on a construction project led by my father. In bringing this project to fruition, I learned how to organize and negotiate with institutions, and we successfully raised 1200 dollars to build our drone – the highest amount allowed by our university for undergraduate projects.
For my second time in the competition, I played a consultant role, leaving behind the engineering zone and focusing on the customer’s needs as well as technical support and finance. Entrepreneurship requires talent in multiple areas. As such, I pulled together a group of schoolmates from different majors: internet of things engineering, telecommunications, and management. Remote-sensing satellite imagery requires real-time detection and recognition of time-sensitive targets. We considered aggregating computer vision with mobile platforms like satellites and drones, writing a proposal to establish our project – the “Eagle” Remote Sensing Reconnaissance System. In this project, our team developed a system on the mobile terminal that could process the remote-sensing images to detect objects. Our objective was to compete with a product belonging to Beijing Aerospace Titan Technology CO., Ltd. We used YOLO algorithms on the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 platform to implement functions of object detection and semantic segmentation. In this case, financial and equipment challenges were minimized by developing algorithms and software.
Through the “Eagle” project, we attended a series of innovation and entrepreneurship competitions, including “Internet +” and “AI+”. Along the way, we utilized the strengths of various institutions. In terms of technical aspects, existing enterprises have strong and competitive national research departments and technical support. Therefore, we consulted several scientists from the National Space Science Center at CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the P.r.i.s Laboratory at BUPT to prepare us for project execution. For finance, we successively raised about 1500 dollars for the 2018 Google - China MoE University-Industry Collaboration Program, as well as the traditional 1000 dollars fund from BUPT. These funds assisted us in renting servers as our computing resource and in publishing our paper. To pitch our project, we attended exhibitions and gave speeches at other universities. Ultimately, we won the National Second-Class Award for Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition at the 2019 BUPT Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Exhibition. The paper of my group members was published on IGARSS19.
As these projects illustrate, my previous entrepreneurship experiences have focused on R&D (research and development). In the future, I expect to bring our product to customers in real markets. Although I am not ready to lunch entrepreneurship soon, I believe ESTEEM will equipt me with the basic business sense and lead me into career tracks outside of narrow technical roles, taking positions of leadership at the intersection of business and technology.
Fun Stuff:
I am watching Silicon Valley) recently. It really resonates with me because I have seen a lot of smart engineers. What happened to Richard Hendricks (the CEO of Pied Pipper in Silicon Valley) are also troubling my engineer friends. Products produced by engineers are too engineered and do not meet the needs of normal people. The show introduced a fictional business philosophy based on compromise among the sales, manufacturing and engineering departments, and that too has roots of truth — provided you substitute the word “respect” for “compromise.”
As the subtitles in Silicon Valley said:
Sales and engineering are the two pillars of the Conjoined Triangles of Success.
Engineering and sales must work together to decide what to build.
Who knows better what the customers need than the people who actually deal with the customers every single day?
