Center for Relativistic Laser Science

 http://nanotube.skku.ac.kr/weekly.html 에서 퍼옴

It has been a hectic year again in 2014!
I would like to thank to all of you in the lab. Some may be disappointed for their poor performance in the research or for their laziness or for their distraction and wanderlust. Hey, that is our life. Everyone does that to some point. But look. If you look back, you have shown some progress at least. Although you did not have good papers, you may have accumulated some data in your hands or at least you learned something from struggling or from mistakes. One thing we have to have in mind is that everything to achieve even a small thing takes time. Waiting is another key word in learning and research. As long as you try something, as long as you do not give up, that is all enough. We move on. That is our life. If you quit trying, then you are dead. Otherwise it is OK.

I really appreciate all your efforts of trying to improve the data. I understand it. Some might consider, saying, 'well, what the hell, why should I bother to try to improve the data. You are not going to get a Nobel prize with this paper. You can just quickly publish it. That‘s what it accounts for your job or promotion..' Well, that may be true or even I am not sure if it is correct. Nowadays, the requirement to get a good job and promotion gets tougher and tougher in practice. So it is always better to get a better paper rather than just the number. So it could be wrong. SO what is the criteria for this? I think the first question you ask is 'are you happy with it?' If yes, you can do that. The second question is 'Are you proud of the data you have and can explain it well to others so that others are happy as well and give you a complimentary word?' The point is once you publish, it will be your face. As a scientist, you represent you with a paper. People judge you with papers not by your academic background or anything.

Another thing I like to mention is an attitude of in particular junior students. Junior students usually wonder when to talk to professor. They heard a lot of bad comments from their seniors how they suffered when they talked to professor without preparing well the data. Senior's coments are of course helpful for their researches. But I think at least for this concern, junior's comments are poisonous rather than help. Why? Because their such comments intimidate students to approach professor. They get more scared and always try to get more data which makes them delay and wander to get meaningless so many data to talk to professor. Professor wonders what happens to this student and push students to talk. This makes him more and more nervous and feel more scared. Things get worse and worse, following Murphy's law. For this concern, I strongly encourage you not to follow senior's suggestion. Everyone one has his own pace. Some are fast and smart and some are slow and not smart. Some works hard and some works slowly. But one thing important is that your professor has to know your character so that he can assign you an appropriate topics for you if you do not have. You'd better directly talk to him as often as possible. You are also scared when your professor is busy and show you to go away sometimes. Still, I am here to talk to you. Without talk, we cannot perform good science. 

So my resolution to you in 2015 is that I will try my best to talk to you more often and discuss science without kicking you out of my office with the reason I am busy or tied up with other things. I wish your resolution is to make up your mind to talk to more often and not to scare of me talking under any circumstance. Let's try in 2015!