Aaron Si-yuan

Hey there! My name is Aaron, and I'm an American-born Chinese who's spent the past eight years here in Hong Kong. Coming to Hong Kong as a 10-year-old Chinese-looking kid equipped with poor Mandarin and non-existent Cantonese skills was a real challenge for me, as you'd imagine. It also didn't help that the secondary school I went to was almost entirely filled with local HK students, meaning that, apart from the lessons, everyone spoke, chatted, and breathed in what sounded like gibberish to me. Although this was extremely difficult for me at first, it made me all the more excited to learn the language and to fit in with the new exotic culture, and as the saying goes -- the harder the climb, the better the view. Regardless of how cliché it might sound, this is also why I love engineering so much.

Just as it's not simple and straightforward to learn a new language or adapt to a new environment, it isn't simple and straightforward to navigate your way through the landscape of real-world problems we constantly face. The solutions to these problems aren't always handed to you on a silver platter, forcing you to spend hours on end working at it. Though demanding and harsh, this process of discovery is precisely what makes engineering so fun and exciting. Through engineering, we can venture out into the unknown and solve problems all around us, some of which we weren't even aware of originally. In engineering, the only limits to your achievement and what you can accomplish is yourself -- whether you decide to go forth and continue to face the challenge or give up and limit yourself to what you're familiar with.

To this end, HKUST has definitely been a faucet for me to explore myself and apply the skills I've developed in new ways, whether it be tinkering with circuits, making handmade gadgets, or building and programming robots. On top of all of this, the people I've met here have all been so wonderful, and have truly made my journey in engineering all the more fun and enjoyable. Who knows where I'd be if I decided to stay in my western bubble all those years ago, but one thing's for sure, I wouldn't have been able to accomplish nearly as much as I have today. Just as my Cantonese skills have grown from zero to competent during my time in HK, I hope to continue to develop myself both in and out of engineering, and I implore you to try and do the same!