25/11/2015
Our Chapter student representative Wang Dacheng from ECE went to an OSA sponsored trip to San Jose for OSA Student Leadership Conference and Frontiers in Optics Conference last month. Let's hear what Dacheng says about this trip there:
"I was honored to represent NUS-OSA student chapter to attend the OSA student leadership conference and the Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science conference 2015 in San Jose USA this October. This trip was supported by OSA, including a return flight ticket reimbursement, registration fee, three-night hotel accommodation and others. The student leadership conference benefited us with different views of leadership, career planning and CV/resume improvement. Particularly, advice given by invited hiring experts illuminated our career path. I met many students from different universities all over the world and learned a lot from those excellent student chapters. The technical conference invited experts to share their latest research results of optics and photonics. Being an NUS-OSA student chapter member, I enriched myself among different activities organized by the chapter and OSA society.
In the student leadership conference, Dr. Philip Russell from the Max Planck Institute gave us a welcome remark and shared his life story. Mr. John Taylor trained us how to use the OSA student chapter tools and resources to enrich ourselves in this optics and photonics community. This is really a good opportunity to improve our leadership ability in a research community. Dr. Hans-Juergen Schmidtake inspired us with his view of the future in optics society. After these talks, six student chapters were rewarded with student chapter excellence prize. Leaders from these chapters shared us their experience on how to improve the chapter in their universities. OSA also invited four hiring experts from both national labs and companies to illuminate career path in a panel discussion. This broadens our vision of future work. These experts also gave us useful advice to improve our resume/CV/cover letter. One student chapter leader even shared his experience on organizing and hosting a student conference. After this student leadership conference, OSA organized a party for all the students to meet and talk with each other. The technical conference of Fronties in Optics/Laser Science unite the OSA and APS communities for five days of quality, cutting-edge presentations, fascinating invited speakers and a variety of special events. This conference provided a good environment to view the work from other colleagues, share opportunities for discourse and network with top professionals from around the world. "