Isolation is not a wise choice.

Last week, I attend a solar cell conference in NUS. The conference lasted two days. On the first day, it was a two and half hours period with presentations from each research group in NUS. On the second, it was a one and half hours presentation given by two top researchers in this field who are from India.

On the first day, graduate students, research engineers, and professors from related research lab presented each of their result. Most of the presentations were about chemical cell(organic solar cell, dye-sensitized solar cell). My presentation was about improving efficiency on traditional single crystalline solar cell. Besides me there were only two more presenters talking about traditional solar cell. However, their research are about studying mechanism like cracking and minority carrier diffusion, which were quite different from my research direction. I noticed that my presentation did not raised much attention.

On the second day, two professors from New Deli presented their research work on the 4th generation solar cell. When I listened to their presentation, I was shocked that these two professors' ideas and results are state-of-the-art. To my surprise that the new solar cell structure they proposed was a 5 layers cell structure with conventional metal contact, single nano carbon wall, new organic material, and quantum dot. Their work is truly much advanced than my work. At that moment, I understand that why my previous presentation did not raised much attention.

My current situation is I am working on this project alone, because it is a small project and it is not the main research direction of my lab. It is kind of carrying out a work in isolation. After I attended the conference, I received a lot of new ideas 100 times faster than reading journals by myself. It is true that isolation is not a wise choice. I have also find that NUS and A*Star arrange conferences and seminar every months, which most of them are free for registration. Now I am ready to attend more of these to get new ideas and open my mind.