Prof. Parsaroan Hutapea: The grades are the result of tenacious people

Native-born Americans often don’t think about how deeply rooted the immigrant community is in United States society. Immigrant citizens own restaurants, manage shops, design buildings, and are deeply involved in daily life in almost every way imaginable. Parsaoran Hutapea, an Indonesian immigrant, is a teacher. He works at the College of Engineering, Temple University, where his colleagues and students have nicknamed him “Chai”.

Born in Sumatra, Professor Parsaoran Hutapea immigrated to the United States when he was just in high school. Aspiring to become an engineer, Chai had to learn English before he was able to study in the states. He recounted how his teachers were Australian, and learning American English was difficult because of the mix of pronunciation and words. After passing the TOEFL exam, he was able to attend North Carolina State University, and described how he was scared his first day of freshman year because of his experience in learning English. “I went to North Carolina and the southern people spoke differently. So it was difficult to learn!”.

Even so, he still considers North Carolina his home, where he earned his Masters and Ph.D. Chai even met his wife in North Carolina, who was attending Wake Forest University at the time. This was interesting to hear, and after further inquiry about why he did not consider his birthplace of Jakarta his home he replied, “I cherished my time in North Carolina, I spent ten years there”. Teaching was not an initial aspiration of Chai’s. “I never actually liked teaching, honestly no teacher would say they like teaching from the get go”, was his response to why he even began to teach.

What was rewarding to Chai was how mentoring students over time gave him the ability to observe how influential he was in their lives. He helped lead them to their success. He described how one student is today a vice president for research and even earning more money than the professor. “I have that satisfaction because he is doing really well” was the perfect explanation as to why he stuck with teaching. How Chai ended up at Temple University was simple, he applied nationally and that was the university that offered the most resources.

When asked about his teaching career, Professor Chai admitted, which is an unusual response for a professor with fourteen years of experience under his belt. He has been a professor at Temple for eleven years and has spent three of the previous years as a postdoctoral associate at Lehigh University, located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

However the reason Chai’s occupation remains in the teaching field is due to the satisfaction he receives from his students, watching them prosper into up and coming Engineers of this generation. In fact he believes that if teachers spend six to ten years teaching, they will grow to appreciate the freedom and academic returns teaching provides. When asked about possibly working for a corporation, Chai acknowledges the benefits as “they pay a lot more;” however “a professor is more independent in their own way,” if he stick to his employment at a University.

While Chai might not be taking a corporate job anytime soon, he is still actively participating in the development of “smart” products. In simplified terms, “smart materials, Nitinol can react on and off based on temperature and remember its original shape,” he explains. Within the smart materials field, he is specifically focusing his efforts on a smart needle with a focus group of surgeons at Temple Hospital, about a mile north of the University.

Currently when surgeons are performing a robotic surgery with a regular straight needle, because of the straightness of the needle and the lack of the ability to feel it is easy to accidentally misguide the tool during surgery. So upon going the wrong direction the surgeon will retract, stitch up the wound, and go the other way. However the professor explains that, “if you have a structure that can be flexible, then you wouldn’t have to retract.”

We asked him what his future plans were. “I kinda got stuck here. I would like to explore other things. We will see if I move to a different place. Not because I don’t like Temple but just to see other things.” It seems that a lot of people today stress over what they could have done in college to improve their grades so they could be “successful”.

We also received an interesting response when we asked him how to be successful. He responded by telling us that the students who turn out to be the most successful are not necessarily the ones with the best grades. “The grades are the result of tenacious (people),” says Professor Chai. Hearing this really put things into perspective for us when we were interviewing him, since we are going into college soon. Speaking to Professor Chai really inspired us to have a tenacious attitude when it comes to school rather than being apathetic about our education.