My name is Yan Zhang, and you can just call me Yan. I come from China. My home is in Hohhot, the capital of the province of Inner-Mongolia. If you have a chance, you should go to see the beautiful scenery there. It has vast green grassland, with millions of sheep, cattle, horses on it, and the blue sky, the white clouds..

I graduated from USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) in June 2004. Why do I choose physics as my major? It is a funny question what I often ask myself. There are many reasons to fall in love with physics, but also many reasons to hate it! I have been tortured by these two feelings for years. It is really fascinating when I get the reasons of the nature. However, it is really disappointed when I can't understand what the physicists have done, sometimes it is so hard to understand that I want to kill myself. However, I am still alive and pursuing my Ph.D. in physics. That is because I like it more than hate it.

Feynman said that "Physics is like sex, sure it will give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." However, I am not that intelligent, what I want to do is something applicable, something that can be put into everyone's life. I will be very excited if many people are using what came out of my mind some years before.

Now I am searching for a group to do research with and finish my Ph.D. However, I am not quite sure which field I am really interested in. I have some preferences about the research, and I want to try some of the groups to see whether I really love that. Meanwhile, I want to learn as much as possible, no matter what kind of knowledge, because I don't know what specific knowledge I will use in the rest of my life. I want to do some really interesting optical experiments in this Optics Rotation course.