How did I end up studying Marine Meteorology in college and getting a Ph.D in Physical Oceanography?

A young friend asked me: “By the way, you chose to become a physical oceanographer or just by chance? Then do you like your research?”

 

In this Blog, I will try to answer the first question.

 

As you can tell from the Blog links below, how lucky one would feel just to be accepted by a college in 1978. I was in the countryside by then (another story for another time), though I could have stayed in Hangzhou because I graduated from high school in the summer of 1977. I didn’t think “change” would come so soon, and I didn’t want to be a factory worker (another story for another time).

 

After having worked through the autumn harvest season, I knew I would not have time to improve my test scores in the countryside with daily labor (no weekends for farmers), limited foods (no meats until holidays or harvest season), and no electricity. So, I would have gone to ANY college that wanted me.

 

Luckily, I got decent Gao Kao scores, and my file was given to SCO (Shangdong College of Oceanography) before HD (Hangzhou University) and ZJCMS (Zhejiang Chinese Medical School—they promised me a spot because I lived in their faculty housing) had a chance to pick me. SCO was my third choice on paper, but my true love then—I can go far away and escape my parents’ supervision. I applied to its Chemistry Department, and was accepted by Ocean Department, which has two majors: Marine Meteorology and PO (Physical Oceanography).

 

My father was not “nobody,” so he went to the admission office in my district. He said: “My daughter never asked to study Meteorology.” He was very concerned, because a colleague of his graduated from ND (Nanjing Univ.) and said only 2/3 of the freshmen eventually graduated from Met Dept after five years of hard work. Well, there was no use, because I had my second choice of studying Math in HD, and “Meteorology needs lots of Math.” In another word, it was a match made in heaven by our great party, who decided my fate for me, or everyone else’s fate for him/her.

 

I was a perfect product of the regime: I would be a good student, or a good worker, or a good farmer no matter where I was sent to. This is because I was taught to “Listen to the Party.”

 

I did one bad thing in college, that is, I didn’t follow one of the school’s rules--not to date. So, I was worried about being sent to a remote place after graduation. In fact, I would have been sent to Zhoushang Island, had I not managed go to graduate school in ZD (Zhongshan Univ.). I never liked Met, but I worked hard to get very good scores for most of the classes I took in college. (You can say I was more like a robot when it came to a test time.) Since I had no time to study for another topic (and maybe I didn’t know what I truly love to do for my life), I took the test and managed to go to ZD even though I was pretty sick of schooling after four years in college.

 

Here, I have to mention Zhang Lao Shi, to whom I am indebted to forever. He graduated from SDO many years before I, and he was from Zhejiang. So, he took me under his wings. He told me that the Met Dept in ZD was weak and that I should consider going aboard, the only thing that ZD could offer me--a stepping stone to a foreign country. I didn’t take his advice seriously, until the first tsunami of going aboard swept me and many others like me.

 

To make a long story short, I wanted to study ENSO, a hot topic even today for some meteorologists and oceanographers, and I ended up in the ocean because my adviser in Florida didn’t have funding to work on ENSO. (Note: Quite a few of my PO colleagues were meteorologists first, though vice versa also can be true.)

 

To be honest, I never thought much about life until I was 40+. Before that, I was merely a drifter, going with the main stream…

 

Others Blog on the same topic:

纪念七七级毕业三十周年

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=4699&do=blog&id=544884

 

我的77级：为了过去的纪念

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=28418&do=blog&id=545188

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