Harvey Scholar Travels - Miguel in China

Over winter break in 2018, I spent about two weeks in Chongqing, China. To provide some context for my destination choice, my freshman year at Mines I met and befriended an international student from China named Nengyi Fu. However, when he first introduced himself to me, he told me his name was “Jerry,” and he still prefers this name (at least in the US) so that is the name I tend to use. Jerry’s dad is also a professor at Chongqing University, and he offered me an informal “internship” to help him and his research team with data acquisition and machine learning. I jumped on the opportunity, as I was very excited to experience a culture vastly different from mine, especially with the guidance of a friend that is native to that culture.

I began my trip on December 18, 2018, and Jerry and I had a very long layover in L.A. that allowed us enough time to look around and even go to the Santa Monica Beach, which was cool since I had never been to L.A. before.

Jerry (left) and I (right) at Santa Monica Beach before flying to China.

The first thing I noticed after arriving in Chongqing was the dense smog that permeated the skyline. I asked Jerry about it and he assured me that it wasn’t smog and said that Chongqing is known as the “city of mountains and fog.” I always thought smog was supposed to be a brownish color, so I took his word for it at the time—a decision I would later come to regret.

The smog in Chongqing is best seen in this picture of me in front of a view of the city.

Jerry’s family lives on the Chongqing University campus, which is bigger than any college campus I’ve seen in Colorado; the school has about 50,000 students. I stayed at the WuYu Hotel on campus, about a mile or so from Jerry’s family’s apartment.

Since I only had two weeks, the majority of my time was spent working on research with Jerry’s dad’s research team. This was an interesting and challenging experience, as nobody spoke a significant amount of English except for Jerry, who essentially translated the information I needed to know as best he could. The project involved gathering data from the city’s power grid in order to determine areas that needed maintenance and/or repairs. The research team had equipment that could measure voltage in an area, however, what was truly needed was the resistance at each measurement location, which could be derived from the voltage using a very complicated equation that took sometimes entire days to compute. The computational cost was very expensive, so the team wanted me to investigate whether machine learning would be an effective approach to predict the resistance rather than actually calculate it. By the end of my stay in Chongqing, I had developed a classification model that could predict whether or not there was a power failure with an accuracy of about 82%.

The outside of the lab where I worked. The lab is called “State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment & System Security and New Technology”—quite a mouthful to say!

There were also plenty of opportunities to have fun during my stay: I got to see some Buddhist and Confucian temples, visit the Dazu Rock Carvings, explore the local music scene, sing karaoke for the first time (called KTV in China), see a couple movies (one of which was in “4D”), and even go to a nightclub on New Year’s Eve (another first for me). My favorite part of the trip was probably the food, which was incredibly rich in flavor, very spicy, and just so different from what’s offered in the US. There were quite a few KFC’s, Pizza Hut’s, and some other knock-off fast food restaurants, but the menus were vastly different from their American counterparts, and I preferred to eat the local food anyway.

Sculpture at Dazu Rock Carvings depicting the omnipotent power of Buddha.

Interesting painting I saw at a local temple.

The Chinese equivalent to a wishing well seen at another local temple; they write their wishes on a red tag and hang it in the hopes that it will come true.

My first dinner in China with Jerry’s family and relatives.

The Buddhist “Wheel of Life” at the Dazu Rock Carvings.

I do have to warn any possible future travelers about the pollution in China. The “fog” that Jerry told me about was, in fact, smog, and began to negatively impact my health as the trip went on. I coughed and sneezed a lot, had constant headaches, and felt tired all the time (even after adjusting to the time difference). After a while I began coughing up small amounts of blood and wound up at the hospital to make sure I was doing okay. Luckily I was in good health, but I feel that it’s my duty to prevent others from making the same mistake I did. If you travel to China, buy a quality air pollution mask first! I got mine too late and wish I had brought one from the start. If you have asthma or any serious respiratory issues, I would recommend exercising extreme caution before planning your travel.

Despite the pollution, this trip was a blast; I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about Chinese culture. If you are properly prepared, the pollution is something that can be dealt with fairly easily, and I hope that it doesn’t discourage anyone from visiting China, as it was the experience of a lifetime for me and definitely expanded my worldview. I can’t thank the Harveys enough for their generosity that made this trip a possibility for me.