ABSTRACT
Ling has a B.S. and an M.S. in Physics. However, most of her peers and professors are engineers and chemists. Thus, although her graduate work in China was in applied physics, she finds it difficult to follow her classmates's and professors's approach to research and academic tasks in general. Not only does she use different terms and nomenclature, but she also tends to be too mathematical and see problems too idealistically when compared to her colleagues. She worries that by trying to catch up with all the different approaches involved in a given problem, she is giving up depth in understanding. Her engineering peers keep telling her, “Don't worry, it doesn't have to be elegant; you don't have to understand it all. What matters is that it works.” This is something hard to swallow for a physicist like her.
