The students at the Wu Chien-hsiung (吳健雄) Science Camp left Hsitou (溪頭) yesterday not only feeling stimulated from their encounters with some of the world's most renowned scientists, they also learned that success was not necessarily dependant upon outstanding academic performance.
Success, as the students learned, comes through hard work and persistence after discovering one's true interests. Three scientists who gave talks at the week-long camp; Morris Chang (
In fact, Chang and Wong both traveled very bumpy roads in search of their true directions in life.
During his opening ceremony speech Tuesday night entitled "Preparing for life," Chang encouraged a roomful of budding young students not to be discouraged by the confusion or failures they may encounter. "Because when you are young, you can afford to make mistakes or be challenged by difficulties," said the president of Taiwan's leading semiconductor manufacturer.
In an effort to encourage the students, he cited his own life experience as an example.
"When I was a child, I used to dream of becoming a writer because I was an avid and serious reader. However, my parents dissuaded me from my aspiration, saying most writers suffered from life-long poverty," he recalled.
He said he had faced his first life crisis at the age of 18.
"China was under the occupation of the Communists. I was forced to forsake everything in my homeland and head to another country to continue my studies. Though my passion toward literature did not fade, keeping my parents' admonition in mind, I chose to study engineering [at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)] to secure myself greater prospects for the future [than being a writer.]
"However, I stumbled terribly when I failed to be accepted by the doctoral program there. I deemed this failure the most severe crisis of my life, not because I needed the degree badly, because I knew I had other options. It was more because I let down my parents and my wife, who I had just married" he said.
"But the failure did not keep me from moving forward. I think people cannot moan over their past failures for long, they have to get up on their feet quickly and look ahead," he said.
He said he then started working at a small company as a department supervisor. His work was fine, but due to financial difficulties, the company laid off all his subordinates, meaning he could no longer be a manager.
"The incident didn't hurt me at all this time because, with ability, I'd built enough confidence by then. I called it an `adverse opportunity.' Afterwards, I went to work for Texas Instruments. Then my career began to soar," he said.
Finding the right path
Professor Wong's story involves his struggle to become an established chemist.
Like most Taiwanese parents, Wong's mother and father hoped their son would become a physician. "It was not my interest, but I tried to fulfill my parents' expectation. It turned out I did not do well on the Joint University Entrance Examination and was accepted into the Department of Agricultural Chemistry at National Taiwan University [NTU]," he recalled. "I did not learn much during my time in college because I was utterly uninterested. It wasn't until after I became an assistant researcher at the Academia Sinica, where I was engaged in the protein synthesis of snake venom that I became interested in synthetic chemistry.
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