In the May 2023 Commencement Celebration, PhD student Yicong Jiang was awarded the 2022-2023 Dempster Prize for his paper co-authored with Professor Tracy Ke, "Semi-Supervised Community Detection via Structural Similarity Metrics."  The Dempster Prize is named in honor of Emeritus Professor Arthur P. Dempster and is given annually to a graduate student in recognition of the student’s research.  In the following excerpted and edited interview, Yicong shares with us how the Stats Department helped him adjust to living in a new country, discover his passion for research, and hone...