收录于博士论文附录B
B-2-4. “Winner” versus “loser”: to be or not to be?
Once upon a time, I felt frustrated because I’m here at UCR and published a few papers, but my classmates or forks at
Fudan
University or even here can publish dozens of papers with an unbelievable speed. One student can even publish 67 papers in four years, more than one paper per month! This gave me a sense that they are “winners”, and compared with these “winners”, I’m a “loser”. However, Francisco asked me not to compare myself with somebody else, because that only will let me down. He told me for several times that the meaning of American higher education is not to make sure the students arrive at the same endpoint, but to make sure that students, with different starting points and different environments, can make improvements gradually and get the most out of such leaning process. In addition, someone told me that first, different research fields are different; second, a lot of Chinese are just “manufacturing” bunch of papers describing the similar thing (i.e., if you use GC-MS to analyze Chinese red tea, green tea, Pu-tuo tea, and yellow mountain tea using one week, then you can publish four cheap papers, although they are almost the same.). I think that their comments make sense.
In addition, I believe that even if others are very strong, we still need to do our jobs and go our own ways. It is not that others are strong then we should give up and sleep at home. Sometimes others always say “You don’t have any chance (e.g., to go to
Fudan
University because you come from a “loser high school”, to be a Professor because you come from a “loser university”). It’s no dice”. You still have to be yourself, totally ignoring whatever others say. Years ago I was a student in a “loser high school”. At that time it was not possible for a student in that below-average school to go to
Fudan
University ; even if you are the best student in a key high school, you dare not say you can go to Fudan. I applied for
Fudan
University , and others ridiculed me, saying it’s not possible. I held fast to my dream and successfully went to
Fudan
University , which is the best of the best in . From my story, we can know there is one kind of persons who live for their dreams. They just hold fast to their dreams and work hard toward them, regardless of “losers” or “winners”.
Finally, we get to know what our unique advantages are. The fact that my “brother” at a better university is strong does not mean he can find a job and I can not. Different people have different advantages. Let’s say he is going to be a surface chemistry Professor dealing with ultrahigh vacuum, but I want to be a catalysis Professor working on powder catalysts, so the presence of him does not constitute any competition to me because we are working on different things. In this respect, “Market Segmentation Theory” does make sense. When I was at
Fudan
University , I took numerous classes on marketing, management, and business. A Professor told us: “Why drink A can also be sold out if Chinese like to drink Pepsi and Coke and the latter two drinks have been popular in for numerous years? This is because ‘market segmentation’, that is, that company claims that drink A is a sports drink and does not contain any carboxylic acid.” Therefore, if the expertise and interest of different persons are different, then one will find the place to survive.
