[Grad School Application Journey] Part 1. Stepping into the world of Optics

I wanted to blog about my feelings as I go through the grad school application process. Unfortunately, I was not diligent enough to do them in the moment, and here I am now, weeks away from starting Master's. But late is better than never, so I will try to remember as much as I can about what happened these past year or two.

So going into the Summer before my last year (Summer of 2017), I had one question to answer, what do I want to do after graduating? Job or grad school?

To be quite honest, both prospects looked pretty dim for me. Not only was my GPA bad (2.98 heading into Summer), but I lacked the most important aspect for both of them: work experience for job, research experience for grad school. Still, I thought that I would have better chance at getting into grad school than finding a job, so I decided on that pretty easily.

I took ECE electives from all over the place: automatic control, microelectronics, circuit design, and power. Not only did I not excel in any of these areas, I didn't find them very interesting. And I did pretty poorly on ECE 301 and ECE 270, so I was not interested in focusing on communication or computer either. So the only option left? Fields and Optics. To be honest, I never thought I would get into Optics until around this time. I thought it was just a dumbed-down version of Physics masquerading as EE.

But I didn't have much choice or options at this point. I had 1 year of undergrad left, and in that 1 year, I had to 1) decide what I want to go into for grad school, 2) befriend 3 faculties who will write letter of recommendation for grad school, and 3) bring my overall GPA up (at least to above 3.0 since that is the minimum cutoff for most grad school)

So I decided to all-in on Fields and Optics. It was a HUGE gamble. There was no guarantee that I would like that field any better than other areas. But I think my belief was that if I end up not liking Optics, I would be in a hopeless situation, so I will, by necessity, like Optics. Not the most logical thinking.

Because of my shitty resume (low GPA, no experience, etc.) combined with the fact that I decided on going to grad school very late, I decided that applying to grad school in Fall 2017 is a lost cause. I would have to apply in 2018 for admission in 2019, which meant that I will have a gap year after I graduate in May 2018. But I thought that was by far the safer choice than applying to grad school with shitty 2.98 GPA and no experience. Besides, I don't think I could have even gotten 3 professors for LoR, so yea, applying in Fall 2017 was pretty much impossible.

So having decided to apply in Fall 2018, my goal for 2017~2018 year was to just focus on getting as good grade as possible and bring that GPA up. Things like taking the GRE, writing SOP, and searching for schools to apply to can wait until after I graduate. One thing I had to keep in mind was befriending at least 3 professors, because that's how many I will need to write me a recommendation letter for grad school. And since I am going all-in on Optics, if I can have those 3 professors be Optics professors, that is even better.

So yea... that is how I got into Optics. I took total of 4 Optics-related courses in Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 (ECE 412, 414, 441, 552) and did well on 3 of them and ok in 1 of them. I am very blessed that I ended up enjoying Optics. If I didn't enjoy it, then I honestly don't know what I would have done, but that is irrelevant now.

In the next blog, I will write about my story of asking for letter of recommendations.