For 12091km, 23 hours, a plane slithered over the vast Pacific Ocean and took me from China to the United States. Its destination was clearly marked on the map, but what about mine?
Image from: Google Maps
The Journey
It was definitely not the first time I took an overseas plane like this — after all, I am now a senior at Furman University, an American college — but the experience wasdifferent from my previous trips.
When I spent my four-hour layover at Narita International Airport, I was in the stressful last hours before my graduate school application. I was waiting for the next flight in the lounge and typing random things into my personal statement draft and a surge of lost suddenly came. The surge was condensed into one sad realization of my life: the future was in the fog and so did the past.
Someone said that showing oneself to others is the journey of self-discovery. I agreed with this statement and as I found out, it was also a journey of struggle. I never had that strong feeling of lost again like I did that day in the airport but actually, the thought still lingered in my deep mind even as my applications had finished.
This was why I finally decided to do something with this thought when I pondered for a personal project topic.
A College Student’s Lost in Past and Future? That doesn’t sound like an easy topic for a multimedia project. A good project topic should be both interesting and practical.
During the brainstorming for the project, I listed the unique experiences I have had in the past that might distinguish me from other college students and then the answer was clear. Most of the experiences were linked to my cultural background and my identity as an international student. Hence, I decided my topic as Chinese Students’ Experience at Furman University.
The Turing Machine
Once the topic had been decided, the following planning became a pipeline business. For the project proposal, I set dates for interviews, organized the materials I had, and considered ways to acquire additional materials. It seemed that I had a complete plan for this project.
“But did I?” I asked myself. I was sure, at that time, that something there was something missing in the project. However, I am not sure what it was. I was not content with my project proposal but neither did I intentionally search for the missing stuff — I didn’t even know where to start.
On the one hand, life is full of surprises. My thoughts on this project got advanced when I was doing my homework for another course, Computational Theory.
A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine, which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model’s simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm’s logic can be constructed.
Image from: The Excel Turing Machine
I know most people might have never heard of a finite automata or a turing machine, so I would simply put it like this: The biggest difference between a Finite Automata (a functionally limited computing model) and a Turing Machine (an omnipotent computing model) is that the latter has a memory storage and thus, a current state.
I finally found the significance of my project for myself. Memory and recording themselves are valuable enough for the present and with the present, one would not be lost in the past and future.
On the other hand, during the process of studying about storytelling, I more and more recognized importance of design and aesthetics. Now people like to say that being visually appealing is not the only standard for good design and there are much more in arrangements and organizations of other aspects in design but I think for me, I still need to learn more about the basics.
Advanced Multimedia Storytelling 