Here is Lo's reflection on earning the Ph.D. degree.
I never thought of curing people in my childhood daydreaming. So I have never thought of being called “Doctor Lo.” This is one of the awkward things I first felt after getting my Ph.D. from Ohio University this summer.
To me, getting a Ph.D. is definitely not making me feel more intelligent. On the contrary, I feel modest, almost to a point of timidity because I notice that there are so many things out there that I need to learn, discover and develop; and I know deep in my heart that I was stretching my mental and intellectual ability almost to the limit to get to this point.
As a photojournalist for more than two decades, I considered myself a visual person. I was never fond of digging into mountains of literal books and statistical data. But getting a Ph.D. is just a means to a bigger end — to learn to develop visual knowledge and, pragmatically, to be able to get a permanent teaching job at the college level in the United States.
Life is full of loss and gain. To be honest, my childhood dreams were becoming a professional soccer star, an inventor, an artist and a scientist (just a little more ambitious than Leonardo da Vinci).
As I grow, I discovered that I was not born for that. But my admiration for great athletes, inventors, artists and scientists has never been less. The effort many of them put into their works are far more than I struggled with in getting my Ph.D.
Friends and relatives always ask me how I feel after getting my Ph.D. I tell them that I don’t see any complacency in myself, but I do see the big hat I have to fill whenever people address me.
Nevertheless, I do see a door opening ahead of me. Now that I have got the heavy load off my back, I am pleased to have the freedom in my leisure time to play a little bit of an athletic star, an inventor, an artist and a scientist. And to make it more fun, I am working on incorporating all that into my teaching. After all, knowledge has no boundaries; everything is connected.
Lo brings years of professional experience in Taiwan and the United States plus an affable personality.