Korean Professor
The instructor for 6133 Physical Design Automation is a Korean professor. His lectures are clear and structured, reminiscent of the “master teachers” from our middle and elementary school days.
He loves pacing back and forth along the side aisles of the tiered lecture hall, his voice rising and falling with the rhythm of his explanations.
Each semester, he takes a group photo with the entire class — a rare course where attendance is actually taken.
On the last Thursday lecture of 6133, he stood at the center of the sunken classroom. With a black marker, he scrawled the semester’s wrap-up across the chalkboard.
When he finished, he turned around, capped the marker, and bowed deeply to all of us.
A quiet wave of sentiment washed over me. The semester had slipped by so quickly.
So often, what seems like an ordinary moment — this second, or the next — is actually a fork in the road, a point of no return. But we seldom realize it at the time.
“You won’t understand yet,” the literature teacher used to say
Back in school, I was always puzzled when our literature teacher insisted,
“You don’t truly understand this yet. One day, when you’re older, you will.”
After all, I understood every word and every line. The poems and essays spoke of frustrated ambition, homesickness, loyalty unrecognized, or fleeting youth.
What was there not to understand?
But then I left for my master’s degree in the U.S.
I landed in Atlanta late at night, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and a blur of fast-spoken English. That was when I first grasped what it meant to be a stranger in a foreign land.
Later, I traveled to Medellín. On Christmas Eve, after a rain shower, the streets were slick and shining.
A homeless man sitting on the sidewalk reached out toward the leftovers I was carrying.
At that moment, Du Fu’s ancient verse echoed in my mind: “If only I could provide a million homes…”
Another Christmas Eve, I saw two sanitation workers clinging to the back of a garbage truck, singing as they leapt off at each stop to collect trash.
Sometimes, they had to sprint to catch up, but they still laughed and sang — a kind of unyielding joy, a carefree defiance that reminded me of old poets who once proclaimed, “I will stride forth laughing beneath the vast sky.”
Later still, my classmates and I would commiserate over the scarcity of jobs and the dead-ends of PhD applications. Those we studied, tested, and scrambled for deadlines alongside were all silently counting down to their own departures.
Every generation of international students faces these crossroads — eerily similar, yet each uniquely their own. The flowers may look the same each year, but the people are always changing.
These experiences are impossible to fully capture in words.
No single phrase like “live in the moment” could ever encompass them.
You must first see how vast the world is
Only then will you know whether you truly love what you do.
Have you found what you love yet?
A series of farewells
May arrives — graduation season. From the third floor of Crosland Tower, I often see students in caps and gowns gathering in small clusters below.
I think back to the friend who first went grocery shopping with me when we arrived in the U.S. We haven’t crossed paths in a long time.
Last week at dinner, we joked about how even the senior student who once seemed so steady and ordinary was now about to graduate. Some high school friends who came to the U.S. never gathered again after those first few years.
It’s a lot like Sisyphus — knowing that the end is always farewell, yet still pushing onward.
EMO Memoir
Age 24.
You sit on the third floor of Crosland Tower at Gatech, eyes fixed on Python code pulsing across the screen. Atlanta’s heavy rain drums against the glass wall, blurring Midtown’s neon glow.
Your mom brings up the civil service exam for the fifth time during the video call. You tilt the camera toward your Pattern Recognition textbook. She quietly asks, “So… after graduation, will you be able to work at one of the big tech companies?”
Age 25.
2 a.m. in the lab, the sharp tang of cold brew coffee in the air. You clutch your hair, staring at a reddening validation curve.
An Indian TA taps the cubicle wall: “Hey, your CNN is overfitting like my grandma’s knitting patterns.” Cheers erupt down the hall — the neighboring team just won a NeurIPS Oral slot. You return to tuning hyperparameters, only to notice that the back of your hand is smudged with half a page of derivations.
Age 28.
At a Denver conference, you clutch a USB drive, trembling. Your slide is stuck on page 17 of “A Time-Frequency Analysis Model for Epilepsy Prediction.” A professor frowns: “That accuracy is worse than random forests.”
Afterward, passing the exhibition hall, you notice MIT’s booth — they’re demonstrating a GPT-4 controlled robotic arm writing equations on a board. Your name tag falls to the floor and is trampled, the logo cracked.
Age 30.
Your fiancée pushes the wedding ring back into your palm: “I don’t want our child born into a data labeling warehouse.”
As the moving truck crushes piles of your old papers, you remember that rainy night three years ago — you insisted on manually proving the SVM kernel trick while your roommate implemented it in two lines of PyTorch for 98% accuracy.
Age 33.
The ER clock reads 4:17 a.m. Curled up in a plastic chair, you revise a DSP algorithm paper that was just rejected.
The CT scan shows a shadow in your stomach.
Your phone flashes a conference notification — your slot has been reassigned to the CEO’s nephew, who will present “Blockchain + AI for Fish Farming.” You mark your advisor’s obituary email as read, but don’t reply.
Age 37.
At a Walmart warehouse, you scan barcodes. Your AR glasses flash a university news headline: the classmate who once stole your capstone idea has just been named an IEEE Fellow.
Your daughter sends a TikTok: “Look, Dad! Your old school is on NASA’s livestream!” You touch a cold can on the shelf, remembering the space debris prediction model you once built.
Age 40.
On a morning when the landlord reminds you for the third time about late rent, you notice someone has starred your Kalman filter code from a decade ago on GitHub.
An email from San Francisco offers to buy the patent, but demands a non-compete agreement.
Your pen hovers in mid-air. On the screen, your daughter draws a heart-shaped function in Matlab. Outside, the storm clouds part, a beam of light piercing through.
Age 45.
At the science museum, you repair a holographic projector.
A little girl gasps: “Mom! That man looks just like the engineer in the Mars rover photo!”
Your wife quietly wipes fingerprints from the display case.
In your pocket, you clutch the crumpled NASA internship offer from 2003 — the summer your visa was denied. You had folded the acceptance letter into a paper airplane.
Age 50.
At a Neuralink launch event, you recognize a formula from page 42 of your long-forgotten master’s thesis — the one that had once been torn to shreds.
Your daughter sends her admission letter: Georgia Tech, Machine Learning PhD, full scholarship.
Rain splashes across your two-decade-old thesis. The chapter title blurs, still faintly legible: “Signal Reconstruction Algorithms for Uncertainty.”
Age 60.
On a Stockholm awards stage, the laser pointer pauses on the acknowledgments slide.
“I thank my father, who taught me how to find signal amidst the noise.”
Your daughter’s voice trembles through a bone-conduction headset.
Inside your suit pocket is the USB your late wife gave you — it holds every rejected paper from when you were 33.
Age 72.
In a Mesa observatory, you calibrate a spectrometer searching for exoplanets.
Your AI assistant reminds you: the draft of your will, written on a rainy night 60 years ago, still lies forgotten in a corner of Google Drive.
As the aurora sweeps over a lunar crater, you finally understand the riddle of your youth — life is not a series of binary choices, but an analog signal sampled at 44.1 kHz, always resonating at some frequency with the heartbeat of the cosmos.