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Student Profile: Bei Yu & Jun Wang

Bei Yu's interest in computers began in elementary school with a fondness for arithmetic and simple Basic programming on an Apple II. In high school, she was "good at language and writing, but just average in math and physics." When she graduated, her father—an engineer—hoped that she would become a doctor, but Bei insisted that she was not brave enough to pick up the surgery knife. She says that while she was excellent when it came to textbook knowledge and exams, she was at a loss when it came to making choices about her future. Bei finally chose computer science because it was more familiar than other disciplines, and because she wanted to keep language and writing as a hobby rather than make it her career.

During Bei's undergraduate studies at the University of Science and Technology of China, she found that computer science didn't quite suit her. Despite herself, she continued in the field when she went for her master's degree at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. For her doctorate study, Bei decided to go abroad, but she was faced with the difficult choice of whether or not to continue her computer science studies. During her master's program, she was especially interested in human-computer interaction and information retrieval, which are disciplines shared by computer science and information science. Still uncertain, Bei applied to seven computer science departments and seven information science departments. When the admissions letters came back, the results were a tie: two and two. Bei chose GSLIS because it was also the school that had accepted her husband, Jun Wang.

Jun Wang already has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology, the same school where Bei completed her master's degree. He explains that he came to the U.S. for a second Ph.D. because of his desire to improve the quality of his education and to gain experience in the U.S. system of education and research. Jun grew up in the same city as Bei, Jiujiang in Jiangxi province. For his undergraduate studies and master's degree in computer science, he attended Wuhan University in Hubei province. Jun's research interests revolve around artificial intelligence, language evolution, and digital library. He is currently maintaining an online bibliography on language evolution and computation.

Their son, Albert Yuelin Wang, was born in 2000. As a self-described "modern student mother," Bei thinks the hardest thing is to manage study and family life. Sometimes she thinks that she needs a clone to help out. But when there are conflicts between work and home, Bei puts her family first. Currently she works at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) with the automated learning group. Her project is on text summarization, using reviews at epinions.com as her data source. Although she learns much at her job, she thinks that she learns an equal amount at home. "Children also teach their parents," she says. "I have become more patient, generous, and persistent."

In order to juggle work and family life, Bei and Jun rely on day care. Just finding a caring, quality day care costs a lot of time and effort. They carefully schedule their evenings and weekends so one of them can work and the other can take care of Albert. Saturday is usually "family day," complete with shopping trips or excursions to the park.

"Of course, nobody wants to get up at 3 a.m. to hold a crying baby," Bei says. "And he grabs everything you don't want him to touch. . . but he brings so much fun and love."