Journey to Silver Award (President's Cup @ HKUST)

(juneblog #3)

With University President Tony Chan!

I just wanted to announce that my FYP team took the Silver Award for our university's competition for undergraduate research and innovation, the President's Cup 2013. I thought we could take home the whole shebang, but what can I say? I'm very proud of my undergraduate work (more could always be done, of course) and reflecting back, it was an amazing experience. Silver is still pretty dang good, I was passionate, and we did our best!

This will be my procrastination post before I have to buckle down and study hard for finals. I just spent a whole hour typing this whole blog and it got erased for some reason so now I have to spend time to pull it out of my memory once more. (Sigh)

After interim presentations and lunch with our PI.

The journey started out with our supervisor/PI (Dr. Ying Chau), our postdoctoral supervisor (Yuki) who gave us the tools to begin, and the inventor of the chemistry we used in our project (Yu Yu whom I worked with during UROP). During our first meeting, our supervisor was especially harsh on our presentation skills and background search for the project. We were critiqued for knowing so little and, in my view, having a superficial knowledge of the topic. In hindsight, though, I was glad she did that because she set the bar high for us. In turn, we set the standard high for ourselves every step of the way.

I believe the hardest part of any research project is the literature search. It can be painstaking and confusing because you have to filter, process, and integrate and because there's such a large body of existing scientific papers, it requires a lot of analytical stamina. With our FYP, the importance of the initial stages could not be stressed enough. That's when we are setting up the problem, understanding the challenges, and designing your methods of approaching the problem. We threw a lot of ideas out there and it felt like we could only do so much in our limited time.

Having experience with hydrogels before, I spearheaded the project in the beginning and we fell in a good rhythm with team structure, weekly meetings, and experiments. But we weren't perfect in how we worked together and me being the only non-local on the team had nothing to do with it. We all had varied expectations of the project and we needed communication in order to work through disagreements, even if it meant relaying things through other members.

During the winter break, I had a one month leave, over which I fell off the radar in leading the project and making sure everything was up to standard (I can be a really big micro-manager so if I don't know everything that's going on, I tend to get anxious). But where I lacked, my teammates taught me to be better. They were just so awesome beyond words. When I was very depressed during the Chinese New Year, they came to my room and brought me food for the weekend and a laminated copy of our departmental photo. On the back, they gave their signatures with short and sweet messages: "Add oil!", "Cheer up!", "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Thinking about that time again, I'm so touched by their actions.

Outside of the first public hospital in HK!

Together with the FYP team, I was happy to find myself in not just a team, but in a family. We went through many new experiences together, including going to the hospital to test out our materials. We got to collaborate with doctors and student-doctors and learned about microvascular surgeries. Our team went to the wet market to buy a pig heart. And we presented our work about five times (I guess this is normal for a researcher?) to the point where we were so well-rehearsed, we didn't have any nervousness when giving our talk to the President of HKUST.

Winning Silver was a surprise, actually, because we thought we would get Gold. But because the judges were from several different departments, the results made it made me realize the unique challenge of bioengineers. No matter what, you are always going to need several years of real clinical research before your work becomes marketable. No one will recognize something that only has "great potential." That's why I'm so excited to be accepted to Berkeley-UCSF's master's program in translational research/medicine (Fall 2013)!

The winning team (also from our Chemical Engineering department) developed a micro-pulse electric water purifier, which more or less has immediate potential in Hong Kong and third world countries. This gives me great pride to say that I studied chemical engineering because the field is so broad and diverse. It was amazing to see the many many things a chemical engineer can do. Most of what we do is aimed at making the world a better place. You can be anything. I am happy to find meaning in my own field (biomaterials, biomedicine).

Finally, to end the journey, we had a farewell dinner at Sai Kung on May 31st with our professor and everyone involved. A nice free meal using the reward money we got for winning the Silver Award (HK3,000). Thank you so much Dr. Ying Chau, Yu Yu, Yuki, and other-Andrea!

Seafood at Sawadee Thai in Sai Kung.

Shook hands with President Tony Chan!