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Interesting how often scientific research links on HN seem to be to discoveries with Chinese names in American universities. As someone who didn't study in the

• askar_yu 14y ago
  to me, Young Lee sounds more Korean than Chinese :)
  • ximeng 14y ago
    Yup good point, I think you might be right. I loved the name of this conference, speakers list happens to be heavy on Japanese: http://www.hfm2012.com/speakers http://www.hfm2012.com/speakers
• xanmas 14y ago
  The top physics kids in the US tend to get picked up by financial (or some other industry) firms because they're really really sharp because making 200k sounds much better than making 30k. This means that the kids who go into physics are doing it because they truly love the subject but it also means that we have a much smaller percentage of kids going into graduate studies than otherwise. This, combined with the fact that many countries are rapidly industrializing and newly able to support an academic class means that lots of international students are applying to Harvard/MIT/Stanford/etc where some of the best science in the world is happening. Some of the foreign kids go back, some stay here. It really depends. As for makeup? probably 40%-50% of my entering cohort was foreign and probably 60% of the foreigners were asian. That's not really a bad thing though. They're brilliant scientists and it's truly a pleasure to collaborate with them and everyone else in my programme as well. Disclaimer, I'm a physics PhD student at Harvard and go to seminars a lot with kids from MIT.