NIMS Student Seminar December 2021 — A Brand New Topic, 4 Months, and a Complete Research Pivot
2021 was the busiest year of my entire time in Japan.
And the peak of it? Presenting a research topic at the December student seminar that I had never worked on before.
A Semester Full of Pressure
From around June 2021, I was juggling several things at once:
- Daily research work in the lab
- Writing a research essay for my PhD application
- Preparing for the doctoral entrance exam
Throughout all of it, one thought kept me going: “If I can get solid research results before the PhD exam, that’ll work in my favor.”
After the doctoral exam was done, I refocused on data collection. I assumed I’d be building on the same research topic I had presented at the 2020 seminar.
Then my supervisor said something I wasn’t expecting.
The Line That Changed Everything
“You can’t graduate on just that topic alone.”
I was genuinely taken aback. Not because the topic was poor — but because of what it implied. I wasn’t allowed to re-present results from the previous year. I wasn’t even allowed to show developments from the old topic.
That meant: start from zero. A new topic. Very little time.
A Topic I’d Never Touched Before
For the December 2021 student seminar, I ended up presenting something completely different.
Still within the broader scope of photothermal heating, but entering entirely new territory:
Developing quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) to measure the temperature of liquid heated by a laser — through to bubble formation under superheating conditions (liquid temperature above its normal boiling point).
I started the optical design and alignment work around July–August 2021.
The student seminar was in December 2021.
That gave me roughly 4–5 months to start a completely new project, in a field I had never touched before.
Honestly, It Was Crazy — But It Worked
Looking back, that timeline was genuinely unreasonable.
But what surprised me more: I managed to get results worth presenting.
Not perfect results — more experiments were needed to continue. But enough to stand in front of reviewers and show that the project was alive and moving in a real direction.
An Unplanned Pivot That Changed My PhD Entirely
Because I was set to graduate with my Master’s in March 2022 and start the doctoral program in April, there wasn’t much room to extend these experiments before the transition.
But it was precisely from this last-minute project that my entire research direction shifted.
The QPM technique I started purely out of student seminar necessity ended up becoming the central focus of my PhD research. Over the course of my doctoral studies, I developed the method further and published three first-author journal papers from it.
The irony: the original topic that triggered all of this — measuring liquid temperature under superheating conditions — never became a published paper. There are some fundamental phenomena in that work that I still can’t fully explain.
But from that unresolved uncertainty, I found a research direction that was new, more solid, and genuinely felt like mine.
What This Taught Me
If you’re ever in a situation where everything feels rushed, uncertain, and you’re being asked to start from zero at the worst possible time:
- Pressure can be a catalyst. Without a tight deadline and the demand for something new, I might never have touched QPM at all
- Not everything that doesn’t become a paper is wasted. Sometimes one “unfinished” project opens the door to something better
- Research rarely goes according to plan — that’s not failure, that’s what genuine exploration actually looks like