This summer has been fun, interesting, and, unfortunately, frustrating at times. It has helped me learn how to navigate a completely foreign culture and how to get around a country where you don't speak or read the language and they don't speak your language for the most part. It taught me how to make the best out of unfortunate situations and how to travel alone. Going forward with my career, this experience has given me more confidence about traveling for work and made me feel somewhat more comfortable about it.
As far as my my professional and research-related accomplishments and experiences, I learned a little more about the uses of VASP, made a professional connection with Dr. He, and some connections with graduate students. This summer I worked on testing different density functionals on ferroelectrics. We chose to work on ferroelectrics since that's the type of material I use in my research in the US and because it hasn't been used to test many of the functionals we were investigating. I used VASP (Vienna ab initial simulation package) for all my simulations. I had just started working with this program before leaving the US so I had to learn a few new things about the input file flags in order to run these simulations. I still have lots to learn about VASP, but I feel like I've learned a little more about its operations that might help me in my current and potentially future research projects. To begin, I fully relaxed the cubic and tetragonal structures for both barium titanate and lead titanate. Then, I created a distortion path that lead from the cubic structure to the tetragonal structure and back to see the evolution of the investigated. I was able to run a total of 9 different functionals along a distortion path of 10 different points for 2 different materials (which I unfortunately had to redo about 2 weeks before the end of the summer because I found an error in the input files I used to run them). I had hoped to run this for 5 other functionals, but 3 of those took over a day to run a single point along the distortion path and 2 of them returned an error that neither my Chinese nor my US advisors knew how to resolve the issue. I think with a little more work and running those 5 functionals we should be able to publish something.
Aside from professional accomplishments and research, I've been able to explore a country that I never thought that I'd be fortunate enough to see. China has such a vast and rich history so everywhere I went, I could see something historic. As a history buff, this was exciting! I got to see the Great Wall, Forbidden Palace, and the Terra-cotta army, to name a few. Fortunately, China is very easy to travel. There's a really easy to use train booking app that helped me book travel between cities. Of course, it does charge a convenience fee, but it's in English and none of the ticket workers at the train station don't speak English (see further into the post for details) so it's essential if you want to travel outside of your host city and you don't speak mandarin. I'm glad and grateful to have been able to see everything that I've seen and explored a country and culture that seemed so foreign from my own.
This being said, I feel I should also address some of the concerns that I had about this trip before coming to China. Due to the portrayal of China in media, I was nervous about safety, especially in Shanghai. I didn't expect to feel so safe in such a big city, but I can honestly say that I've felt safer in Shanghai than I felt in Tampa, New York City, or Philadelphia. Although this changes every four to eight years, in my case, the current United States presidential administration (including both the president, his secretary of state) and many members of his party have appeared to be quite hostile to the Chinese government. I was concerned about what they might do while I was here that might put me in danger. Thankfully, escalation didn't rise past a trade war, but you can definitely see how the trade war has negatively effected the people here.
On a different note, almost everyone I've interacted with here has been nice and understanding which I also didn't expect before coming here. At one point, I was in a restaurant by myself and was having trouble communicating with the waitress, but a complete stranger took time to translate for us and made small talk with me even though she was eating dinner with her friend. She could've just as easily rolled her eyes and not helped as I might expect. Not just this happened, but the hotel housekeeping woman also has made small talk when I've been in the room and always smiles and says hello. Very few people have seemed upset when they spoke mandarin to me and I very clearly didn't understand what they were saying. Many of them did their best to mime what they were trying to say.
Speaking of not being able to speak mandarin, many people do not speak English (not outside of tourist areas or Pudong, at least). Before continuing, I want to make it clear that I'm not complaining, angry, or frustrated in anyway. This paragraph isn't meant to be interpreted that way but rather is intended to clear up some things that others might hear pertaining to this topic. Upon accepting this internship, I had talked with many people about how they communicated during their trips to China, including a family member, friends of the family, and other people my mom knows from various organizations. They all said not to worry since I'd be in Shanghai so I wouldn't have a problem and English would be everywhere. Upon arriving at the internship site, I quickly realized that this was not the case here. The staff a the hotels (both of them) didn't have a person who spoke English, none of the train station or subway workers that I interacted with spoke English, and in many restaurants around this area of Shanghai, there wasn't a single person on the wait-staff that spoke English or even a menu in English (in Pudong, the restaurants I went to had at least one waiter who spoke English). Although many people have been kind about it, this is something to be aware of before coming to China. I'd recommend that people vacationing, studying abroad, or accepting an internship in China to learn conversational Chinese at the very least. If you're only coming for a short period of time (~2 weeks), then you should be fine, but longer than a month it becomes very isolating to be able to communicate with almost no one.
Overall, this experience was enlightening. Although there were some bumps in the road along the way, I think this was a positive experience. It allowed me to travel to a place that I thought I'd never be able to go to. It taught me how work in a different research environment than I'm accustomed to. And it gave me more confidence about solo travel. I'm so thankful for this experience and opportunity.
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