In the summer of 2018, I put my research on halt and travelled to Beijing to participate in the Tsinghua-Imperial Global Fellows Programme, which turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made. Overall, this programme provided a perfect platform for my personal development and professional network expansion, and I am very glad that I didn’t miss out on this opportunity!
The programme started with a week-long course packed with team activities. We formed inter-institutional and cross-disciplinary teams to solve given tasks and participate in inter-team competitions. The highlight was the climate change and energy themed accelerator project, which perhaps was also the most challenging part. Under tremendous time pressure, we had to generate an idea and sculpt it into a sound business plan or collaboration project before pitching it to a panel of experts. Our team came up with the idea of a hybrid water desalination system powered by renewable sources to simultaneously solve the freshwater crisis and its voracious appetite on electricity. Though we didn’t make it to the final, we forged a good relationship with our Tsinghua counterparts (who I still keep in touch with) laying a pathway for future collaborations.
After the course, I stayed at the Tsinghua campus for another 2 weeks to complete the research visit at the Department of Chemical Engineering. I joined the separation technology research group over there to work on membrane technology for the application of water purification. I gained a lot from the research visit, especially from the conversations I had with my host supervisor. During our meetings, he shared some of his excellent ideas on membrane technology and opinions on the field’s future prospect. His insights left me with many innovative ideas to bring home.
Apart from the programme itself, one of the other aspects of the programme that is worth-mentioning is the time when we travelled together as a group. As a person who finds sudden change challenging, I would have never thought that the spontaneous travel plans the other participants came up with were ironically my favourite part. On one occasion, we woke up at dawn and travelled up north for a few hours to climb the Great Wall on a sweltering day after drafting a rough plan the night before. But thanks to these spontaneities, I was able to travel around and explore Beijing. As a foreigner of Chinese descent who has never travelled to China before, I am very grateful to have had this opportunity to experience the local culture which is rich and also akin to mine a lot!
"Overall, this programme provided a perfect platform for my personal development and professional network expansion, and I am very glad that I didn’t miss out on this opportunity!"