I think about the word creating a lot for the past few days. When I look back at my questions from week 1, I feel like I’m watching a five-year-old scribbling.

My questions were superficial and silly. The only valuable question on my week 1 post was the one given by DanO. “Why did I pick an Art school to study computers?” Over the course of six weeks, this question has become less foggy and less of a conundrum, and by today, the weekend of Week 6, the answer is pretty clear.

I come from an entirely academic background, to expand, I applied to computer science for all schools except 2 and only came up with the idea to learn interactive media arts in the summer of 2023. I prepared my whole portfolio in three months, and honestly, it was pretty trashy. I used to think of this as an interesting story to introduce myself, but I soon realized it really, actually put me at a huge disadvantage in studying interactive media arts. I had stopped creating for a long, long time.

When I applied to IMA, my resume was filled with academic records and awards for my coding skills. I was constantly in a low mood, numbly following instructions from my high school instructors, practicing coding, attending contests, mostly failing, and occasionally earning another line for my resume. My boyfriend told me I was depressed during high school when he read my diary—well, we’ll never know. But even though my mind was in total chaos, something, a thought from nowhere, was dragging me toward applying to at least one art school. Maybe it has something to do with the question: Why did I even enjoy coding when I was small?

I’ve been tinkering with various small games using things like Scratch since elementary school, and by high school, they changed into Python, C++, and JS. Looking back now, most of them are pretty much trash, especially the ones I messed around with before the application season, before high school. But during the process of tinkering with this ‘trash,’ I was happy. I realized I was creating something, and I was so close to being able to truly bring something from my mind to life.

I enjoyed coding because I enjoy creating.

I was simply fascinated by how they operate, and how they create complex interactions with humans, starting from the two value logic of machine code. I also wanted to create by building something that only computers can make possible.

Robots. I still remember the afternoon when my mom dropped me off at a lego workshop near our home when I was in primary school. By the time she came back to pick me up, I didn’t want to leave, and I persuaded her to stay by my side while I finished the thing I was working on. I was taking my 100+th picture of my little lego robot to make a stop-motion animation. It’s one of those childhood memories I’ll never forget. Later on, just like any lego kid, I wanted to figure out how to make the robot move on its own. That’s when I discovered lego mindstorm and started my very first coding experience, using drag-and-drop code blocks to create programs that controlled the movement and behavior of lego robots. I also learned about bearings and servo motors. I was already getting hands-on experience with a graphical programming interface, which gave me a head start when my primary school elective class introduced us to Scratch.

Then I became the leader of the robotics team of my middle school. I loved when my robot starts to go beyond moving, in fact, she went far beyond moving. She was able to accomplish complex tasks like throwing balls and identifying terrain on the race field and avoid obstacles automatically. Then we grinded for days and nights and won the first prize at a national contest in Hong Kong. We celebrated and I cried. She was wearing a beautiful outfit that I had designed and sprayed for her, and seeing her on the champion’s podium made me cry even harder. Later, I became the core coder for my high school’s robotics team, but the excitement around robotics started to fade. We were focused on winning prizes, and we kept winning them, probably because we were a fairly prestigious high school in Shanghai with decent support. But under the pressure of winning, I became more of a debugger than a creator. I wrote better code, communicated more smoothly with engineers, and tried my best to meet their expectations, but from that point on, I never cried for any robots again. I quitted creating.

Codes. All of my coding programs in high school are dead by now. I didn’t renew the server subscription anymore, nor did I continue with maintenance or troubleshooting. The last website I shut down was the campus BBS. A bug had appeared, and with the already low user base, the backend management became chaotic. So I just decided to shut it down. Deep down I know that these projects were more about appearances. Perhaps when I initially came up with these ideas, I genuinely wanted to do something for the people at my high school, but over time, they gradually slipped into the “flexing zone.” They are allowed to be present in my high school life only because they enhanced the chance of my getting into CMU, and for every part of them, some unique abilities and qualities must be exposed to the Admissions Officers. The plan was clear: one project for software, one for hardware, and one for integration.

But I do remember that I was coding to create. I started learning my first programming language because I wanted to use the command block in Minecraft to build a puzzle map that would transport players and display scripts on the screen. One of my best friends was into redstone mechanics, data packets, and triggers at the time, so we kind of worked together. The addictive potential of coding lies in how each roadblock pushes you to learn something new, and soon I was hooked not just on Minecraft, but on the thrill of coding itself. I developed this strange drive not just to make things work, but to make them work well. The more I coded, the more I saw technical skills like debugging, optimization, and scalability as a form of creation. People say coding is an art, and in fact, everything becomes art when you’re focused on creating something.