He Yang, ER

PERSONAL STATEMENT

Inspiration, a sudden intuition, that’s what I get when I go to these sci-fi movies, those
uniquely created, futuristic and eye-catching objects which has always led me into a day dream,
of how the world would be. This is the kind of lifestyle I craved for a long time, and I started
drawing layouts of how those gadgets would look like. One of them was the “cerebrum” idea
inspired from the X-men film. The word “cerebrum” gave me an idea on how computers might
work, I felt there must be a core in every computer and hence I went to local MPH bookstores
and tried to extract information from those unfamiliar thick books, which were agonizingly
tough. Luckily there was a friendly middle aged man who was in the same section, who noted
my curiosity on computers and he was the one who gave me the basics on how computers
work and introduced me to the field of Computer Science.

I started exposing myself to scripts and coding, for learning them were more cost
efficient. Thanks to unlimited broadband, I was able to dish out a bucketful of scripting
knowledge out of the internet, and did one some projects in some field I’m interested in. One
of them was the brute force testing script I did to test out the difference between “random
brute force” and “orderly brute force”, some silly names I created myself, and dedicated my
free time in physics, mathematics.

As I did not want to hook on to the school-study-exam cycle which my country practices,
I often discussed computers, mathematics and physics fun-facts with some of my friends,
sometimes writing music compositions and playing them, and sometimes even solving physics
and mathematics questions, interesting ones, somehow I feel I like doing them, like the one
combining arithmetic with logic gates, and I’ve pondered on that one for weeks and enjoyed
every moment of it.

Yet, what I’ve doing the majority of my time were academic since I started my
secondary education. I’ve always had a passion on doing lifestyle changing machines and
maybe get those sketches from my old sketch book to work, yet I never really had the funds to
do so, the time to acquire from the busy sole-academic and all-rounding life, the way my
country insists on its new generations.

That’s when studying abroad became a viable option for me, and Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology was definitely one of my best options to study in due to its
globalized and open minded environment.