Before I came to the US, everything in my life was arranged by my parents. They provided me a job at my father’s company after I graduated from college. I was waiting to be married just like all the other girls at my age in China. Everyone around me told me that is what life should be, and I accepted their opinion without doubt. At my twenties, I know what my life will be like for almost the next 50 years.
However, I always had feelings that the ordinary life was not what I want. As old memories about the life in college continuously wandered around my mind, I found myself still willing to learn new stuff. I then told my father about my feelings that I still desired to challenge myself by studying abroad, and I remember how angry and how shocked I was when I heard his answer. He said: “you are an ordinary woman. You life should be always the same as other girls. The only future for you is to get married with a guy and be a good wife.”
From that moment on, I started to make my own decision about my life, because I disagreed with my father’s point of view. I believe I should be an outstanding individual instead of a doll staying behind my “future husband” for the rest of my life. I decided to prove that my father was wrong by getting the admission from a university in the US . It took me almost a year to prepared for the language test and standardized test. Although the thickness of the practice exam papers for language test is about 16 to 17 inches, I never felt painful for preparing the exams, because I knew I was getting closer to my dream—studying abroad to pursue the research goal I’m really interested in.
Until today, accepting the admission from University of Michigan is still the best decision I have ever made in my life. But life was hard when I started school at Michigan, not only because of the new environment in a foreign country, but because unlike the other students who has just received their undergraduate degree, I hadn’t studied for years. Since most of my work at my father’s company was not related to my major in college, I almost have no chance to strengthen my technical skills. I still remember the how desperate I was when I took computer architecture class for the first time. I sat in the classroom, seeing the instructor Brehob opening his mouth trying to explain things. When everybody concentrated on his words and then took notes, I felt I was in a panic, because I was the only student who was out of the situation. I didn’t understand the material he taught in class, I didn’t understand his jokes. At midnight, I rushed out of Duderstadt crying that I can never finish homework assignment 3. The hundreds of lines of my 5-stage pipeline processor’s Verilog code never produced the expected result. No TAs can help me Nor can I ask the instructor for help because I cannot speak a complete sentence in English.
I knew some of my Chinese classmates quit the class. But I didn’t. It was true that if I quit the class in time, I could get a good GPA. But I knew I had to challenge myself by studying computer architecture, otherwise, I will never have a chance to study my beloved area. Hence, I read through the Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach till late night everyday, just to remedy the Instruction Level Parallelism that I didn’t understand in class. As I didn’t understand C++ in the coding assignment, I took advantage of vacation and winter break studying not only C++, but also data structure and algorithm all by my own. I made my first step to talk with students whose native language is not Chinese and discuss course problems with TAs. Everything is about challenging myself, because I strongly desired to break up with the old life in China.
Besides, I met interesting people with different backgrounds there. Among all these people, Professor Thomas Wenisch was the one who influenced me then most. I knew him from his parallel computer architecture class. When he discussed the interesting ideas behind those ISCA papers, I can see the light in his eyes. From his explanation about the former paper works , I found there are a lot of design space in parallel computer systems. Thus, it is naturally that I became interested in this area. During his office hours, I told him about my future plan that I started to think about doing research in the area of parallel computer architecture. He then encouraged me in all aspects. Although I cannot speak fluent English, he never showed impatience when talking with me. He taught me to solve problems by my own. He encouraged me to find an internship position in industry to gain knowledge about the state-of-the-art technology, since in the Computer Science Society, the industry and academia are bind tightly.