Temple Degree Critical in Gaining Admittance to University of Hong Kong Ph.D. Program
By Bruce E. Beans
Futao Lu
The Hangzhou, China, resident believes his chances of being admitted to a Ph.D. program were greatly enhanced by the Master’s degree in Economics he earned from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “The strong recommendation letters my professors wrote gave me the opportunity to get the offer from the University of Hong Kong,” says Lu. “The fact that they have great connections all over the world, including professors at the University of Hong Kong, made their recommendations even more convincing.”
Futao Lu is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the highly selective University of Hong Kong, the city’s top university and the second most highly ranked university in Asia.
Lu came to Temple in 2011 after studying math for three years at the University of Science & Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui. Thanks to a Temple-USTC agreement and Temple’s innovative Dual Bachelor’s Master’s Degree program (DBMD)—which enables students to spend three years as an undergraduate at their home university and two years earning their Master’s degree at Temple—by last spring he had earned both degrees in just five years.
Lu notes that Dai Zusai, the assistant Economics professor at Temple who supervised his Bachelor’s Degree dissertation, earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the same year one of his University of Hong Kong (HKU) interviewers did. Another of his most influential Economics professors at Temple, Associate Professor Dimitrios Diamantaras, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester—as did Lu’s current advisor at HKU.
Both professors are experts in game theory, the strategy concept Lu explored in his Bachelor’s dissertation and which remains his current research focus. But the impact Temple’s faculty had on Lu extended beyond game theory. “While working on my Bachelor’s dissertation I met twice a week with Dr. Zusai,” he recalls. “Half the time we spent discussing my dissertation, which taught me how to become a researcher rather than just a student. The rest of the time he shared his academic experiences and gave me suggestions for Ph.D. applications.”
Dimantaras and Professor Michael Leeds, the Economics Department’s director of graduate studies, did likewise. “When I asked Dr. Leeds for some suggestions regarding my personal statement to HKU, I expected some abstract suggestions,” Lu says, “but he sat down and helped me modify it word by word.”
Lu adds that, had he not gone to Temple, he would not have been able to switch his major from Math to Economics. “The experience I had at Temple,” Lu concludes, “is my most precious possession.”
