Undergraduate / Essay of UIUC : From a film editor to a computer scientist. [5]

Prompt: Explain your interest in the major you selected. Describe an experience related to that area of study, what first introduced you to this field, and/or your future career goals. Limit your response to 300-400 words.

Having been a film editor in high school for over two years, I've always made contact with computers and been curious about their power. Through what magic can the computer shape videos into graceful movies? How does the editing software function? Therefore, in eleventh grade, I took some computer science courses online to find the answers.

In those courses, as I learned more and more basic programming skills, I gradually realized that computer science is a creative process which allows me to apply those skills in my own way. With this understanding, I formed the idea of creating something by myself. Since I always edited video pieces and I learned that a video is just a combination of numerous pictures, I decided to start from designing a simple picture editing software. At first, I wrote a group of simple codes to control the color of pixel through changing the strengths of red, green and blue by various degrees. However, because an image may contain millions of pixels, I found it would be impossible to write millions groups of codes to control the color of every pixel in a picture. To solve this problem, I searched online and found a powerful tool-For Loop which could run a group of codes millions of times to let my codes function in a whole picture. Therefore, with a combination of my codes and the For Loop, I successfully made my own picture editing software which could work as both a color filter and a brightness regulator through controlling the color value of pixels by different rates, quite simple but still with its own grace.

My simple picture editing software let me realize how powerful a few lines of words, punctuations and numbers can be in computer programming, and it made me eager to delve deeper in this field. For my personal future, I hope to combine my love for computer science and filmmaking to design my personalized film editing software. Moreover, I also hope to build my own filmmaking studio through some interdisciplinary collaborations with other engineers. The College of Engineering at U of I would definitely be the place where I can realize my dream.

(362words)