#SoCaltech: Amber Liu
Amber Liu. Credit: Sergio Solorzano
“My hardest competition was the US National Table Tennis Championships in 2023 when I was 15. I needed to reach the semifinals to make the national team for the world championships the next year. After a long fight, I placed first in the under-15 girls’ singles event. It was a lot of pressure because it’s what I had been working for the whole year. It’s also single elimination, so if you lose, you’re out. Winning required a lot of mental and emotional strength. I doubted myself a lot, but my coach would tell me, ‘Just go and do it whether or not you think you can.’ In the world championships, we were the underdogs, so I felt less pressure. I was the youngest on our team, and the entire team was much younger than the others. For many of us, it was our first time playing in an adult championship, so we didn’t have anything to lose.
"Table tennis has taught me a lot about discipline and how to adjust my mindset and control how I feel and perform. It gives me a lot of courage to try things that may seem out of my comfort zone or like I have to put in a lot of effort, because I’ve already done something harder. For example, I wasn’t scared at all to come to Caltech, and it’s been great. Meeting people I didn’t know through the club has been really exciting. Even though the other members are all graduate students, it’s nice to play with people, and we also get to play as a team in collegiate tournaments. I really hope that more undergrads, even people who just play for fun, decide to join the club.”
Amber Liu (first-year undergraduate student), who grew up in Atlanta, has played table tennis since age 7. She has competed in dozens of tournaments, and, at age 15, earned a spot on the US team that competed in the 2024 World Team Table Tennis Championships in South Korea, where she won the only match she played in. As a member of the Caltech Table Tennis Club, Liu helped the team win the 2025 National Collegiate Table Tennis Association tournament. She is exploring applied and computational mathematics as a possible major.