My experience

My name is ZHAO Yi (赵羿).

I was born in Xiangxiang, a very small city in the south of China in Hunan Province. In the first sixteen years of my life, I had been staying in my hometown. During that period, I was very quiet and loved reading and playing video games.

I had very good grades in the high school. In 2015, I was admitted into Zhejiang University with a rank of top 0.1% in the college entrance examination. I majored in engineering in the college.

In the last year of my undergraduate study, I was admitted into a joint-degree program between École Polytechnique and Zhejiang University, where I focused on renewable energies and their applications. In the first year of my master, I did an exchange at the University of Sussex in the UK for 5 months. After that, I conducted my master thesis as an intern at TotalEnergies, an oil & gas company headquarted in Paris. Luckily, I obtained my master’s degree at the age of 21 in 2020.

After graduation, I gave up the opportunity to do a PhD at the University of Oxford and chose the University of Colorado Boulder. Due to the Covid 19, I was not able to arrive in Colorado. I stayted in Paris and at the same time worked at TotalEnergies as a renewable engineer and did my PhD remotely. After one semester of online lectures, I dropped out of the University of Colorado Boulder.

I was very very grateful to my supervior at TotalEnergies. In the beginning of 2021, he offered me full funding to find a PhD project globally on renewable energy integration. Finally, I was acceptted by EPFL and started my PhD with the topic of “the refinery of the future” in September 2021.