 MEET THE STUDENTS
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Yongqiang's Three Favorite Things about the ECE Department:
1) The professors. They are dedicated to their research and teaching.
2) The learning environment and the facilities.
3) The students are friendly and brilliant.
Advice to Incoming Students:
Do some research about the background of different professors in the ECE department. It is a large department and professors have a wide range of research interests. Once you come here, feel free to talk to different professors and find your real interests.
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Yongqiang
talks about ECE @ Maryland:
I am from Yuzhou, a beautiful city with a long history in the central area of China. I got my Bachelor and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Zhejiang University, China, before coming to the University of Maryland for my Ph.D.
I was attracted to mathematics and physics when I was in high school and wanted to learn more about fancy technologies like control and electronics. Electrical engineering seems to be the right place for me to satisfy that curiosity.
I majored in controls. The strength of the research in the area of controls and the overall rank are two of the main facts I considered when I applied to universities. ECE at the University of Maryland is well-known for its research in controls. It also has a famous multi-disciplinary research institute:ISR. All these things made the University of Maryland a good choice for me.
I am pursuing my Ph.D. in controls. Although controls is a small area in the ECE department, it is widely applied and closely related to many other areas such as communications and optimization. I am particularly interested in solving large-scale problems and problems that don’t have analytical solutions, and my research interests are in developing new methods in simulation based optimization, stochastic control and Markov decision processes.
I like to attend the regular seminars given on Fridays and the coffee hours which provide good opportunities for me to make friends and talk to other students about research as well as life at Maryland. I also enjoy all kinds of sports. I play pingpong and badminton regularly.
Students in the ECE department are from all over the world. They are friendly, brilliant and hard-working. Professors here are knowledgeable, nice and ready to help students.
My experience as a student has broadened my academic horizon. The multi-cultural experience has made me more open-minded, and my experience as a teaching assistant has made me feel more confident.
I am currently under the supervision of Prof. Marcus and Prof. Fu. They taught me a lot about various aspects of research and how to be a good teacher. I also learned a lot from their attitude toward research, teaching, and many others aspects of academia and life. They are very nice people, and encourage me to attend conferences and to interact with people. I am a lucky person to have them as my advisors, and I really appreciate their generous help.
I took one course with Prof. Tits, and I also was a teaching fellow for him for one semester. I learned a lot from him in class as a student as well as a TF. I took two courses with Prof. Krishnaprasad. He is very dedicated to lecturing, and his lectures are insightful. Discussions with him after classes have been very helpful for the course itself as well as for my research.
After graduation, I would like to try research opportunities either as a faculty member in a university or a researcher in a lab. The Future Faculty Program (FFP) founded by the engineering school provides training for various aspects of being an excellent professor for students who seek to pursue a career in academia. I was selected into this program and have benefitted a lot by joining.
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