How I Finally GOT into My PhD program (and Many Thanks)

Acknowledgement in the dissertation gets published and lasts forever. I started this personal blog to memorialize those who helped me land a spot in my PhD program, just as in an acknowledgement. My hope is to express gratitude towards those who have helped, inspired, and challenged me, and to reflect on my journey towards pursuing a PhD in Information Systems as an undergrad at a Chinese university. Should anyone someday find it helpful, I would consider it an added bonus.

Life-altering moments happen before you know it. For me, there are 4 that happened during my junior year.

The first is booking an office hour with the then Associate Dean, my mentor, Prof. Ziliang Deng, around the mid-term period of the first semester. I went to seek his advice on my path ahead. Learning my past research experience (I had some, thanks for Prof. Qiang Wang) and perference for life (I hope to do what I am really interested in), he encouraged me to seriously consider a PhD. This advice led me to engage in deep conversations with professors, friends, family, and, most importantly, myself. Some weeks later, I made the decision to embark on the PhD path.

The second is choosing an elective course in the first semester of my junior year. I didn’t learn programming during my first 2 undergrad years. I should have. So I challenged myself and enrolled in a rather demanding programming course taught by Prof. Maggie Li. This decision turns out to be the most important one in my undergrad years. After deciding to pursue a PhD, I scheduled an office hour and talked to Maggie about my aspiration (and left a CV with a rather good GPA), and asked if she happened to have any projects that I could help with. Boom, 2 weeks later, Maggie involved me in a healthcare project where I performed Machine Learning tasks. 2 months later, we started working on an empirical paper, which then led to the collaboration with Prof. Yan Huang, who then became one of my referees. It was also Maggie who first brought up “Information Systems” to me (I majored in Finance and had absolutely no idea of IS before). I recalled her saying “you should consider IS as a potential field”, and I replied, “what is IS?”…

The third event is attending a PhD level course instructed by Prof. Jingmei Zhou during the second semester. In the first class I appraoched her and brought up an idea about how ChatGPT (which had just been launched then) challenged Q&A platforms. She found it interesting and asked for a detailed proposal. 1 week later, we decided to meet every week after the class. 4 months later, we submitted the paper to a workshop (WITS 2023), where it was accepted and presented in India. This collaboration comfirmed my passion for IS, specifically, the topic of generative AI.

The fourth moment is sending an email to Prof. Raveesh Mayya, when I got admitted by the NYU visiting program, at the end of my junior year. He responded within five hours: he was surprisingly interested in me and asked to meet at Matto Coffee in the Stern Building. Starting from then, I got involved in multiple projects as a Research Assistant and met him twice a week. Raveesh encouraged me to think deeper and challenged me with lots of empirical questions. He also provided me an amazing opportunity to play with LLMs, which later turned into a collaborative project. He guided me through the challenging PhD application journey and has been both a mentor and a friend to me.

These moments have shaped my trajectory. There are so many others I would like to thank (esp. my parents and my girlfriend Sylvia!). If I accomplish anything, it stems from you guys’ incredible support.