Review for 2020

2020, people say this year will be written in history books. From Australia fire to pandemic, from Black Lives Matter to US political drama, worse events showed up one by one. For me, at the stage of 26 years old, these really make me rethink humanity and my life philosophy.

In retrospect, my personal life seems not to be influenced a lot compared to those in the centre of disasters. I even accomplished a few achievements that would be significant milestones in my whole life.

Career

New Zealand conducted a serious lockdown for more than one month from the end of March, which unfortunately suspended my MSc project and ruined a few ongoing big experiments. On the other hand, my dear uni generously gave us a one-month extension. During the lockdown period, I self-studied HarvardX online courses in Data Science. Even though I missed verified assignments as a audible student, I gathered operational experience in data manipulation and visualization with R and later applied these skills in my thesis data analysis. I submitted my thesis in August and received my grade in October. Whoo Yeah, it is “A” and makes my Master GPA upgrade to 7.00/9 which is the minimum GPA requirement for PhD scholarship. This significantly increases my future career flexibility.

After graduation, I have got a considerable summer scholarship for a microbiota project in my previous research group. My main responsibilities were to extract gDNA from environmental bacteria, amplify ribosomal RNA and prepare a library for downstreaming high-throughput sequencing. These molecular experiments are quite conventional, but the benefit I gained from the experience was immeasurable. It feels so good without working under due pressure.

Non-nerd Life

I would evaluate my 2020 as a fruitful year compared to 2018 and 2019 in which I only finished 34 and 20 movies & books respectively. In 2020, I finished 82 movies & books in total.

Blue bars represent movies, green bars represent books

Among those movies, four anime movies directed by Satoshi Kon really impressed me, especially the one called “Paprika”. This anime talks about a device which could immerse humans’ dreams. Paparika’s subconscious
One main branch of this movie is that the bad guy employed this device to hack everyone’s dream and peel their evil subconscious out, which helps him to rule the dream world. The side branch is about a policeman who has psychological issues because of giving up his dream of becoming a movie director. In the end, the policeman broke through his layers of nightmares and was brave enough to face reality and helped the psychologist, Paprika, save the world. One super touching scene is that Paprika finally expressed her love to her colleague who is fat, nerdy but always sincere and kind. A victory for nerds!!! The interactive dream with reality
This movie also reflects a lot of Japan social issues such as prevalent suicide, compensated dating of teenagers and sneak shots.

In terms of reading, I must recommend the autobiography of Yuen Ren Chao and his wife, Bu Wei Yang. Both of them borned in the 1890s and started overseas study in the 1910s. In their early childhood, they received the most traditional Chinese education with Four Books and Five Classics. Later, they were educated by the most cutting-edge science and philosophy. Before I had firmly believed that traditional Chinese education was the root cause of thousand years of bad habits, which clamp down on the mind and distort the personality with the examples of Jin Fan and Yiji Kong. However, their life experience completely changed my prejudices and even convinced me that their early education greatly supported their future success in western-style academics. Nevertheless they are one-century older than me, their liberal thoughts, persistence in academics and insistence on dignity always inspire me. Interestingly, once Yuen Ren Chao said in his books, “The academic year 1918–1919 was one of my most unsettled and unsettling years within memory. I did not know what to do, where to go, geographically, nationally, intellectually, or emotionally." In 2020, more or less everyone has such feelings, but still, I really cherish my life and luckiness as Natsume Sōseki said, “Where there is more light, there is more darkness” and surely vice versa.

Yuen Ren Chao with his wife and four daughters. Cambridge, 1941

These are the snapshots of my 2020. It is great to finish my MSc study on time and enrich my daily life with those fantastic movies and books.

Sincerely, hope the world can go back on track in 2021. I am waiting for vaccines!