Get your AREC M.S. degree and see the world!

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Hao Lu, a 2009 graduate of the master's program, has certainly gone places since finishing at AREC. His first stop was Cornell University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2014. While at Cornell, Hao completed doctoral research on wholesale electricity markets, specifically on demand-side management (managing distributed storage capacity) to address the uncertainty of renewable energy sources such as wind generation. Next on his world tour was working for PG&E as a senior quantitative analyst. Hao says that his team at PG&E was an internal consulting team, helping other teams conduct quantitative modeling and analysis on a project-by-project basis. From PG&E, he briefly visited home in China then on to Australia where he worked doing long term energy consumption forecasting and then became a risk analyst with Energy/Australia. Will Hao settle permanently in Australia? He's not sure. He's seriously thinking of Canada in the future and then...? He has told us, though, what his time at AREC meant to him.

“I am always grateful to AREC for providing me the opportunity to study with assistantships. The academic training, especially in econometrics, laid a solid foundation for my doctoral studies. My PhD advisor was actually my econometrics instructor during my first year Ph.D. study and I topped the class with A+. Looking back, I feel the M.S. program at AREC, through its focus on research including the thesis writing, prepares its graduates for successes at doctoral programs. I also realized that it is a luxury for AREC students to have the opportunity to use SAS, which many companies cannot afford. The intimate and close relationship between the AREC faculty and students is precious and not common at other schools.”