"Li immigrated to the United States at 15, arriving with her parents in Parsippany, New Jersey, with little English or money. To get by, her parents worked cashier jobs and Li worked in Chinese restaurants. When her mother's health declined just as Li entered college at Princeton, the family needed to find a way to "make some money to survive," she toldBloomberg."
"Even as she navigated the manicured campus at Princeton, Li joked she was the "CEO" of her parents' shop. As the only one who spoke English, she balanced physics problem sets with "all the business": answering phones, managing inspections, talking to customers, and handling billing. When she left for Caltech to begin her PhD, the job didn't end: She kept running the dry cleaner remotely until halfway through graduate school, she told Bloomberg."
Fei-Fei Li immigrated to the United States at 15, arriving in Parsippany, New Jersey, with her parents and little English or money. Her parents worked cashier jobs while she worked in Chinese restaurants. When her mother's health declined as Li entered Princeton, the family opened a dry-cleaning store to make money. Li served as the shop's de facto CEO, handling phones, inspections, customer interactions, and billing while studying physics. She continued managing the business remotely into graduate school at Caltech. The experience taught her resilience, which she calls essential in science and life. Her academic focus shifted from physics to questions about the nature and learnability of intelligence, prompting her to examine computer vision alongside psychology and linguistics.
Read at Fortune
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