phd experience
11 Signposts5 Saplings5 Chests4 Seedlings2 Trees1 Withered1 StoneOver your PhD journey, you are bound to hit both highs and lows… why not be in San Diego when that happens?
I went to UC San Diego to get my PhD in Electrical Engineering
Summary
Applied to the Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD program @ UC San Diego in Fall 2012, recruited Spring 2013, admitted Fall 2013, received MS in Spring 2014, graduated Fall 2019. This was a typical timeline.
Details
Basic requirements
I received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC San Diego. The department is one of the largest on campus, and (at the time) had 12 research areas, each with their own requirements for graduation.
At my enrollment, the requirements for the ECE PhD program were as follows:
- Education: 48 graduate course units - some biophotonics, computer vision seminars, machine learning, and mostly research
- Doctoral committee: Vikash Gilja (chair), Eric Halgren, Duygu Kuzum, Cory Miller, Truong Nguyen, Sonya Wang
- 3 from ECE, 3 from external departments
- Research: 2 first-author papers, 3 co-author papers
- Exams: preliminary, qualifying, dissertation
- All exams were given orally, with private committee Q&A
- Paperwork: mostly running around between offices for signatures
Research focus
I was initially fulfilling the requirements for the Photonics research track, since that was my "specialization" while studying Engineering Physics at Stanford. Looking back, those 3 graduate-level classes I took to learn about lasers really set the course for this journey... The coursework qualified me for an internship at Furukawa Electric, where I developed an interest in semiconductor lasers. This led to my recruitment by Professor Shayan Mookherjea to his micro/nano photonics lab, alongside future Drs. Peter Weigel and Hannah Grant.
However, during ECE 290-a fall research seminar to connect funded faculty with new students-I met Professor Vikash Gilja. He was a first-year faculty member looking to start the Translational Neuroengineering Lab, and gave an exciting talk about the future of brain-machine interfaces. He had come from Stanford as well, having completed a successful study with BrainGate enabling those with ALS to think-to-type text. His first project as a professor was to bridge the ECE department and the School of Medicine, and extend his research into human-clinical work. I told him I wanted to work with him, and became a founding member of TNEL.
This also meant I had to switch to the Medical Devices & Systems research track, since we weren't using lasers to decode the brain. Also, this new track was very interdisciplinary and allowed for committee members from the schools of medicine and neuroscience.
Research lab - TNEL
Professor Vikash Gilja opened the Translational Neuroengineering Lab in 2014.
Lab website
Contributed to the development and maintenance of the Translational Neuroengineering Lab site.
Full circle
In a full-circle moment, I was invited back to speak at the ECE department recruitment event in the spring of 2024. I shared some details of my experience, as seen below: