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Some time during middle school, I began my journey to establish a rock band, become its drummer and, most importantly, grow magnificent long hair. I enrolled at a local music institute for drum classes twice a week. I didn’t have a drum-kit at home, so I’d eagerly wait for those two one-hour sessions of smashing cymbals and double-kicking bases every week. I was having a great time, but some part of me always felt that I was not exploring my musical creativity as much as I could. 

Over the next few months, as I continued to develop my mastery of the drum-kit, percussion became a part of my everyday life and soon I could sense rhythmic patterns in ordinary sounds. When no drums were available, I’d start finger-tapping in synchronous rhythms on any rigid surface and, before long, finger-tapping became an integral part of my rhythmic intelligence.

Unlike drumming, finger-tapping allowed me to incorporate melody into standard grooves by tapping on surfaces that had varying degrees of hollowness. Since it was a percussion style that I instinctively developed by myself, finger-tapping gave me the artistic freedom to create something new.

But I didn’t want to shape my spontaneous finger-tapping artistry to master another percussion instrument like the Tabla or Maschine.

Therefore, I decided to invent my own instrument. Equipped with my expertise in robotics and coding, I used electronic items like piezoelectric sensors, pcbs, and transistors to build an instrument that reflected my own finger-tapping habits and patterns. It had ten small pads for my fingers and two large pads for my palms. I chose a raspberry-pi as its CPU and programmed it to play all kinds of melodies and beats. In this way, I learned how to coordinate my different talents and skills to amplify my total creative output.

My friends and family suggested that I name and advertise my invention and maybe sell it to a company. But if I did that, I would lose the essence of why I built it. I built it not to master its musical capacity but to develop my own musical creativity. 

I’ve always strived to find connections among the dissimilar. 

It started when I was a kid and my dad taught me Sudoku. As he explained the rules, those mysterious scaffoldings of numbers I often saw on his computer screen transformed into complex structures of logic built by strategy. Gradually, puzzles became a constant in my life. In elementary school, I began searching for patterns in the world around me: thin, dark clouds signaled rain, the moon changed shape every week, and the best snacks were the first to go. I wanted to know what unseen rules affected these things and how they worked. My parents, both pipeline engineers, encouraged this inquisitiveness and tried explaining how they solved puzzles in their own work. Their analytical mindsets helped me muddle through homework and optimize matches in Candy Crush.

In high school, I threw myself into all my classes and studied by linking concepts across subjects. Mathematical syntax transitioned easily to English grammar, and the catalysts for revolutions resembled isomers of the same element, nominally different with the same properties. 

As I grew older, my interests expanded to include the delicate systems of biology, the complexity of animation, and the nuances of language. Despite these subjects’ apparent dissimilarity, each provides fascinating perspectives on the world with approaches like color theory and evolution. Unsurprisingly, my career aspirations changed every week: one day I wanted to be an illustrator, the next a biochemist, then a stand up comedian. But when I discovered computer science, something seemed to settle; I had finally found a field where I could be creative, explore a different type of language, and, yes, solve puzzles.

Best of all, I believe my superpower has helped me knit together my identity. Although my relatives’ rapid Mandarin escapes me, in them I recognize the same work ethic that fueled me through marching band practices and late nights. My multicultural friend group is linked by our diverse passions: k-pop, hockey, Hamilton. While to others my life may seem like a jumble of incompatible fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle, each piece connects to become something more.