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It was 1949 and I was 15 year old in my last year of high school away from  home in a British boarding school in Hong Kong. People started asking me  where I plan to go to college. The default choice is of course the Hong Kong  University. I took its entrance exam and passed it. So everyone assumed  that is where I’ll go next Fall in 1950. However, at  that time I began to show an aptitude for mathematics and  physics and I heard of a famous university in the US named MIT.  So without knowing anything about MIT, I wrote a letter inquiring about  admission. Back came an air mail envelope full of forms and information  about the school. So with no one around to advise me or tell me the  difficulties, I filled out the form and sent in the application.Out of  everyone’s expectation, I was admitted and a letter of admission came to me in the Spring of 1950. I still remember my godfather, in whose HK home I usually spend weekends, was so excited that he took the admission letter around for everyone to see.

This fateful decision to apply to MIT and my Mother’s sacrifice  to send her  only  son 8000 miles away to get a head start determined my  future in a crucial way. In many ways it opened up all the opportunities  available to me in later life. The lesson here for young people is  “Aim high, the worst that can happen is you get NO for an answer”.

Note added 3/13/2015: Perhaps this blog can be read in conjunction with http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=250198 How did I get my lifetime job? which were the second important decision of my life.