The title seems abit strong, but this reflects to a certain extent of how I feel lately. This feeling sinks in even more especially when I'm in the lab working on the mini-project on FinFET. It is a pretty mundane job, basically taking a bunch of mechanical strain data, which doesn't really need much brainwork and hence leaving me with a lot of room to daydream.
So a usual chain of thought would go like this..
- hmm, wat am i doing here?
- ok, i'm workin on FinFET. Sounds high-tech, but is it something I can gain an understanding in and find an angle to pitch to my sponsored company back home so that they'd give me some $$ to start a start-up?
- ok, finfet is certainly a great technology, but what really interest me and let me see the potential of a start-up or even evoke some sense of excitement is gotta be OLED, the thing that i've been workin on in michigan...
- well, working on OLED doesn't seem feasible now that i know none of the professors in berkeley works on OLED..and the only professor working on organic electronics has his hands full in inkjet-printing and organic transistors stuff that OLED would not be in his radar...
- so basically my dream of startin a start-up involving OLED technology seems abit more remote...so why did i come to berkeley in the first place? should i have gone to stanford for that management science in engineering thing which is only course-based and probably more inclined to my business interests?
that's when I really feel a sense of panic...i've always set myself lofty goals and usually my plan always plays out the way i intended them to be...but it looks like this strategy of working-in-engineering-field-so-i-can-convince-ppl-back-home-i-have-sth-to-start-my-business-on might just backfire...i'm afraid of settling into a project that i have no interest in just to satisfy my advisor requirement for me to get my master degree...it would really be a waste of time if it turns out like tat...perhaps i was too naive to even think that i can learn any technology in a meaningful way that could give me sufficient background to launch a business on..and yet this is what daydream is all about...and quite frankly i think this is my strength, ability to dream...
perhaps i'm complaining too much..but i certainly do not want to look back after these 1 yr+ here and decided that i would have been more productive elsewhere (this is also the part when I start to miss Ann Arbor alot...many great friends and i was working on OLED!)...actually on the 2nd day I arrived in Berkeley I wrote myself a list of things i wanna achieve during my time here...there're about 4-5 items on the list..."run a marathon", "learn another language", "write my first full-length movie script", "record a serious demo album of my songs", "get to know tammy more"...i can't find that sheet of paper now but i think that's all i have on that...surprisingly i didn't write down anything about learnin about OLED or engineering stuff or start-up ideas...maybe i was assuming that this particular career-related goal of mine would go smoothly...not that i will end up in a bad job if i don't get to do the kind of research i want..there's alot of great opporunity for me in my sponsored company...it's just that i always have this almost sentimental idea of doing things myself, and growing a start-up seems like the ultimate challenge that will bring about the most self-fulfillment...i'm still hanging on to that dream, though it looks like i'd need to take some substantial detour now..
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