Student recruitment & positions available
Master candidates
Typically, three positions are available every academic year, with 1-2 students accepted in each of the two recruitment periods: November-December for the interview round and March-April for the written examination round. Interested candidates can email the professor in English for an interview, during which each candidate will be assessed on their professionalism and potential for career development. As these positions are highly competitive, they are offered to candidates that can demonstrate strong work ethics and professionalism, self-motivation for professional development, and career ambition for leadership positions.
Bachelor candidates
At NCKU's Department of Chemistry, undergraduates can undertake a research project as the elective course "Study of Topics" (專題研究). Interested students can contact the professor to arrange an in-person meeting to discuss position availability, research topic, and timeline. Note that acceptance is not guaranteed, and will be based on the student's time available and academic record. Typically, students are requested to join the laboratory for training during the Summer/Winter break before the start of the semester.
PhD and Postdoctoral positions
None available at this time.
Expectations of MSc students
Work ethics & professionalism:
Research during a Master degree is considered to be training for the workplace, and behaviour befitting of a professional is expected. This includes being punctual, willingness to put in effort beyond the minimum requirement, attention to detail, a sense of responsibility and pride in one's own work output. Lastly, success in research is never guaranteed, so tenacity in overcoming setbacks is required.
Professional development: leadership
As part of leadership training, every MSc student must act as teaching assistant for the undergraduate teaching laboratory for at least one semester. This is typically undertaken in the first semester of the first year. During the second year, students may be asked to assist the professor as teaching assistant and run tutorial for his first year lecture courses.
Professional development: administrative & managerial experience
Running a research laboratory requires the inputs of many, and all laboratory members are expected to take part. This is part of students' training for leadership positions in their future career. Tasks expected of laboratory members include (but not limited to):
Procurement – contacting salespersons, getting quotes and negotiating contracts, processing purchase orders and bookkeeping
Safety compliance – fulfilling legal obligations for the purchase and use of hazardous chemicals and ensuring all works performed in the laboratory conform to safety requirements
Maintenance – regular upkeep of instruments, arranging for repair if necessary
Supervision –
Responsibility to stakeholders – assist with preparation of materials for research sponsors (e.g. grant report) and journal publications
Professional development: language ability
All communications within the research group are in English, including all group discussions, progress presentations, and both the thesis itself and thesis defence. While there is no requirement for English proficiency initially, students are expected to be self-motivated and improve their language ability over the two years of a MSc program.
Graduation Requirements
Academic research aims to create new knowledge through the scientific method of constructing hypotheses and experimentations to gather evidence, so that a conclusion can be drawn by logical deduction. Each MSc student will be given a research question, and experiments will be performed to gather evidence to comprehensively support or refute an answer. As part of scientific rigor, chemical systems are optimised for the research aims, experiments are repeated to demonstrate statistical reproducibility, and in-depth analyses are performed to give the "why" and "how" in answering the research question. To be considered for examination as part of graduate requirements, the content of a MSc thesis should be able to defend the answer to the research question, and is of sufficient quantity and quality to form the basis of an international peer-reviewed publication.