I’ve forgotten some of the details of my second-year master’s student seminar, because honestly, 2021 was an extremely busy year. From the middle of the year — around June — I was already overwhelmed with many things: daily research, writing essays to apply for the doctoral program, and preparing for the PhD entrance exam. At that time I thought, “If I can get some solid research results before the exam, that would definitely be a plus.”

After the entrance exam was over, I went back to focusing on collecting research data. At first, I thought I would graduate using the same topic I had presented in my 2020 student seminar. But then my advisor suddenly said:

“You can’t graduate with just that topic.”

I was completely shocked. Not because the topic was bad, but because there was so little time left. I was not allowed to present the same results from the previous year, nor was I allowed to show any further progress on that topic. In other words, I had to start from zero — with an entirely new topic.

And that’s when the real surprise came.

For the 2021 student seminar, I ended up presenting a project I had never worked on before. It was still within the overall theme of photothermal heating, but this time we tried something completely new: developing quantitative phase microscopy to measure the temperature of a liquid heated by a laser — all the way to gas formation (bubble formation) under superheating conditions (temperatures above the normal boiling point).

I started designing the optics and doing the alignment around July or August. The student seminar was scheduled for December. That meant I only had about four to five months to start a completely new project — in a field I had never touched before.

Looking back now, it was absolutely insane. But what’s even crazier is that I actually managed to get enough results to present. I only needed a bit more experimental data, and the rest would be continued the following year.

The journey in the second half of 2021 was nothing like what I expected. After beginning the construction of the quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) system from scratch in July–August, I only had four to five months before the December student seminar. It was absurd — especially for something entirely new to me. But fortunately, by the end of the year, I managed to obtain results solid enough to present.

Because I was scheduled to graduate with my Master’s degree in March and begin the doctoral program in April, there wasn’t much room to extend this experiment in the short term. Yet ironically, it was this “last-minute” project that completely redirected my research path. The QPM technique that I initially developed just for the student seminar eventually became the core focus of my doctoral research. During my PhD, I expanded this method further and successfully published three first-author journals.

Ironically, the original topic I worked on during my second year of the Master’s program — measuring liquid temperature under superheating conditions — never became a journal. Some of the fundamental phenomena remain unexplained even today. But it was precisely within those uncertainties that I found a new research direction that was more solid — and more uniquely mine.