fang.
A little something I'm really passionate about
eight thousand miles.
a journey, a distance, a dream, a privilege
8000 miles is the distance between the Bay and Singapore, the little red dot in South East Asia and the place I called home for basically my entire life - until college.
8000 miles is the distance that separated me from what I considered to be the ideal education: the liberal arts, a system that would allow me to take and choose classes I'm interested in BECAUSE I'm interested in them, and not because they were part of a specified set of course-work I had to complete en-route to finishing my degree.
And so, each of us travels that 8000 miles for a different, personal reason. For me, it was firstly and primarily for the Liberal Arts.
Creativity comes from a confluence of ideas
I believe that creativity comes from a confluence of ideas. I believe that it is from diversity that new and original ideas emerge, because what is innovation but the application of ideas and concepts from one domain onto the technical, hard facts of another?
Steve Jobs is the trite example in this case - he incorporated aesthetic typography he learned from a calligraphy class into the original macbook - but there are others; Robert Salazar, who combined his love for paper origami and his expertise in space travel to create compact space equipment that unfurled in space, or John Goodenough, who co-invented the lithium-ion battery through the union of his knowledge in physics and the material sciences.
And there are many others - luminaries, visionaries, whose ideas push our world forward, whose insights emerged precisely because of that diversity of knowledge that formed the foundation for their creative ideation.
That's the person I'm striving to become, a thinker informed by a diversity that serves as the wellspring for the emergence of original ideas, a creator adept at the tools to materialize these ideas. To me, the latter meant a CS education, especially in our world moving increasingly toward the digitization of products and services.
A T-shaped education
And so, my idea of an ideal college education is really T-shaped: broad-based and founded in diversity, yet also deep, focused on 1 domain of expertise: computer science.
My story began 8000 miles from here, where, in a sleepy Serangoon (place in Singapore) cafe the first inklings of this conceptualization took shape on a napkin taken from an amused waiter. Today, I am so, so grateful for the opportunity to live my dreams, to work towards the person I'm striving to become, as a CS Major in UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Sciences.
