A precise search, and an offer that came almost immediately
When Gaoshan Jing applied to Lehigh’s PhD program in electrical engineering, he already held two master’s degrees. With his family settled near Philadelphia, he took a focused approach to finding a doctoral program: he looked for professors within commuting distance who were doing serious work in MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems), his research area.
That search led him to Svetlana Tatic-Lucic, who had recently joined Lehigh’s faculty and was building a MEMS research group with two other faculty members. She had also recently won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the group had access to a MEMS deep etcher, an important piece of fabrication equipment.
The fit was immediate.
“I submitted my application materials, and within a few days, she called me directly,” Jing recalls. “She said, if you don’t have anything else going on, why not just come now? Everything about the match, the research direction, the equipment, the timing, was exciting. Once I had that offer, I didn’t look anywhere else.”
For Jing, the key was research fit. “For a PhD, you’re not just looking at rankings,” he says. “You’re looking at whether your research direction truly matches your advisor’s. I had read my advisor’s published work closely before I even applied.”
His family also pushed him toward a doctorate. “My parents told me I had to get a PhD,” he says. “That expectation is part of what kept me going, because earning a PhD in the U.S. is genuinely difficult, and Lehigh’s program was no exception.”
A legendary teacher, and a final exam on a napkin
Among the faculty who shaped Jing’s time at Lehigh, Professor Doug Fry stands out. Jing took three of Fry’s circuit theory courses and remembers his ability to make difficult concepts intuitive.
“There was a saying among us at the time: Fry could teach a monkey how to design a circuit,” he says. “He had this rare ability to take something enormously complicated and build it up from the simplest possible foundation.”
The courses were demanding, but Jing says the payoff was substantial. “After finishing his course, I realized I could look at my own engineering circuits, as well as other relevant engineering projects, and immediately see through them,” he says. “He didn’t just teach the material. He reassembled everything I already half-knew into one coherent, connected structure.”
One memory captures Fry’s approach especially well. On the last day of his most advanced course, covering analog circuit design, the professor took his small class to a bar near campus before the final exam. This was no traditional test.
Instead, Fry improvised what Jing calls the “napkin test.” He asked students to look at hand-drawn circuit diagrams and use their engineering intuition to estimate the answers. "You should look at the circuit structure just like a painting," Fry told them. "Just guess."
“It sounds absurd, but by that point in the semester, we’d built up enough intuition that our guesses were sound engineering judgment,” Jing says. Fry looked over their answers and told them they had all passed.
Independent research training
Jing’s lab was in Lehigh’s Sherman Fairchild Laboratory, in an environment where researchers across departments knew one another. His advisor also gave him considerable freedom to pursue whatever resources his experiments required.
“If Lehigh didn’t have what I needed, my advisor would just say, go figure it out,” he says. That sometimes meant traveling to other universities, such as Cornell or Penn State, to use specialized equipment for fabrication and characterization.
That independence became one of the most enduring legacies of his Lehigh education. “I haven’t done anything identical to my dissertation work since returning to China,” he says. “But that research experience gave me a complete mastery of the fundamentals. It shaped me into an independent, confident scientist with solid engineering training, rather than someone who needs to be led.”
A small town that felt like family
Jing also remembers Bethlehem as a close-knit community that suited focused research. He and his labmates became regulars at a nearby sandwich shop, where the staff eventually knew their orders by heart. The quieter setting, he recalls, offered a useful balance: close enough to New York City for a Broadway show or business trip, but removed from the distractions of a larger city.
That sense of community extended to Lehigh’s staff. As he prepared to graduate, one staff member told him to focus on his experiments while she handled the administrative details. Years later, another staff member helped him resolve a visa-document problem just before a flight home to China.
“It’s been almost twenty years, and I still remember it clearly,” he says. “The people at that school genuinely cared.”
A career built on Lehigh’s training
After Lehigh, Jing joined the faculty at Tsinghua University and later moved to the Chinese Academy of Sciences to dedicate his work to foundational scientific research.
He says Lehigh’s name may not be widely recognized outside engineering circles in China, but engineers know its reputation. “Talk to anyone who actually works in engineering, and they know exactly what that name means,” he says. He also points to classmates who went on to careers at IBM, Apple and Qualcomm.
For Jing, the most important part of Lehigh’s legacy is the education itself. “Our school is genuinely strong, and I’ve always believed the education is worth it,” he says.
Decades after his own decisive phone call from Lehigh, Jing remains a strong advocate for the qualities he experienced firsthand: close faculty relationships, rigorous engineering education, hands-on research and a community that cares about its students.
一次精准的搜索，几乎立刻收到的offer
Gaoshan Jing申请理海大学电气工程博士项目时，已经拥有两个硕士学位。由于家安在费城附近，他在寻找博士项目时格外聚焦：他专门寻找通勤范围内、正在开展MEMS（微机电系统，他的研究方向）相关工作的教授。
这次搜索，让他找到了Svetlana Tatic-Lucic教授——她当时刚加入理海大学，正与另外两位教授共同组建自己的一个MEMS研究团队。她刚刚获得美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的CAREER Award；同时，她和另外两个教授正在联合申请项目、组建自己的实验团队。她的实验室刚拥有一台MEMS深硅刻蚀机，这是在MEMS领域内一件高精尖的加工设备。
双方都觉得彼此在项目和研究上高度契合。
“我提交申请材料后，没过几天，Svetlana就直接给我打了电话，”Jing回忆道，“她说，如果你手头没什么别的事，要不现在就过来吧。研究方向、设备条件、时机，一切都太吻合了，让人非常兴奋。一拿到这个offer，我就再也没考虑过别的学校。”
对Jing来说，关键在于研究方向的契合度。“读博士，你要看的不只是排名，”他说，“你要看的是自己的研究方向是否真正契合导师的方向。在申请之前，我就已经把导师发表过的论文基本都读过了。”
Jing的家人也一直推动他攻读博士学位。“我父母告诉我，我必须拿到博士学位，”他说，“正是这份期待，支撑着我坚持下来。因为在美国读博士本身就非常艰难，理海大学的项目也不例外。”
一位传奇教授，和一场用餐巾纸完成的期末考试
在塑造Jing理海大学求学时光的众多教师中，Doug Fry教授格外突出。Jing一共修了他三门电路理论课程，高度赞扬他能将困难的概念讲得直观易懂。
“当时我们同学之间流传着一句话：Fry甚至能把猴子都教会设计电路，”他说，“他有一种罕见的能力，能把极其复杂的内容，从最简单的基础一点点搭建起来。”
这些课程难度很大，但Jing说这一切都是值得的。“上完他的课以后，我发现自己看设计的工程电路以及近似的动态系统时，一眼就能看穿其中的逻辑，”他说，“他不只是在教知识点，而是把我原本一知半解的东西，重新组装成了一套完整、连贯的知识体系。”
有一段记忆，格外能体现Fry特别的教学方式。在他难度最高的那门课（ECE450 – 模拟集成电路设计，Analog Circuit Design）的最后一次课上，Fry带着这个小班，在期末考试之际去了校园附近的一家酒吧。那堂课没有传统意义上的考试，取而代之的是Jing所说的“餐巾纸测试”——他让学生们观察手绘在餐巾纸上的电路结构图，凭工程直觉给出答案。
“这听起来很疯狂，但到那个学期末，我们已经积累了足够的直觉，那些‘猜测’其实就是扎实的工程判断，”Jing说。Fry看过他们的答案后，告诉大家都通过了。
独立的研究训练
Jing所在的实验室位于理海大学的Sherman Fairchild实验楼，在那里，不同方向的研究者彼此都很熟悉。Svetlana Tatic-Lucic教授也给了他很大的自由度，只要实验需要，也非常支持他自行寻找任何资源。
“如果理海大学没有我需要的东西但是康奈尔大学或者宾州州立有，导师就会直接说，没问题”他说。这意味着Jing可以直接联系康奈尔大学或宾州州立大学的实验室，找时间时间去使用操作他们的专业设备，完成研发项目，导师都会支持。
这种独立精神，成为他理海大学教育中留存最久的部分之一。“回国以后，我没有再做过和博士论文完全一样的工作，”他说，“但那段研究经历让我做到了基础知识的融会贯通，足以让我成为一名具备扎实的工程技能，能独立开展研究的科学家，而不是一个需要被人牵着走的人。”
一座像家一样的小镇
Jing还记得，伯利恒是一个非常适合专注做研究的紧密社区。他和实验室的同学是附近一家三明治店的常客，店员后来甚至记得他们各自的固定点单。他回忆说，这种更安静的环境提供了一种恰到好处的平衡：距离纽约足够近，可以去看一场百老汇演出、出一趟商务差，但又远离大城市的种种干扰。
这种社区意识和归属感，同样体现在理海大学的教职员工身上。临近毕业时，一位工作人员告诉他专心做实验就好，他不清楚的行政细节有她来搞定。多年以后他还清晰的记得，另一位工作人员在他回国航班起飞的前一天，帮他解决了一个紧急的签证文件的问题。
“差不多快二十年过去了，我依然记得清清楚楚，”他说，“学校的人是真的关心在意你的。”
一段建立在理海训练之上的职业生涯
从理海大学毕业后，Jing先是在清华大学任教，后来又加入中国科学院，如今主要从事前沿基础研究工作。
他表示，理海大学这个名字，在中国的工程圈子以外或许并不算广为人知，但真正的工程师都理解它的声誉。“只要是真正做工程的人，一听就知道这个名字意味着什么，”他说。除了科研机构，他还提到，有同学后来去了IBM、苹果、美光和高通等业界工作。
对Jing而言，理海大学留给他最重要的部分，是这份教育本身。“我们学校真的很强，我一直都相信这份教育物有所值；在这个求学过程中，所有人投入的时间、精力、关心，都没有白费，”他说。
距离那通来自理海大学的决定性电话，已经过去二十多年，Jing依然是他亲身体验过的这些品质的坚定拥护者：紧密的师生关系、严谨的工程教育、动手实践的科研训练，以及一个真正关心学生的社区。
