From First Month to First Year: A Whirlwind at ITP

About a year ago, I walked into ITP wide-eyed, carrying more curiosity than clarity—along with a tangle of wires, half-baked ideas, and a fierce urge to make things light up. Today, I’m soldering at 3AM, debugging cursed loops, creating circuits from scratch, and finding stray resistors in my pockets. I’m still wide-eyed—just with a bit more confidence, calloused fingertips, and a growing sense of wonder.

This past year at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program has been wildly inspiring, deeply creative, and nothing short of transformative. In the span of two semesters, I’ve learned more than I ever imagined—not just about technology, but about how to make ideas real, how to collaborate generously, and how to embrace the beautiful chaos of the creative process.

What I’ve Been Learning (and Unlearning)

When I first arrived, I was bursting with curiosity especially to explore physical computing—and oh, did I fall deep. I finally began to understand what it means to merge hardware with software: to make devices speak in pulses and glows, to give movement to code, and feeling to circuits. I built experimental tools and tangled machines, crafted soft contraptions that responded to touch and time, and spun up networked websites that whispered to sensors and servos. From chaotic breadboards to browser-based tools, from glitchy prototypes to cloud-connected experiments, I conjured systems that glowed, buzzed, moved, and sometimes miraculously…worked.

My classes this 2nd semester gave me new languages to think, make, and explore with:

✿ Connected Devices taught me how to bring objects to life with the internet—from data-fetching to storytelling through APIs.
✿ Haptics translated feelings into vibration and presence you can feel, it let me translate emotion into vibration—from gentle buzzes to dramatic pulses
✿ Electronics for Inventors gave me a solid foundation in how circuits really work—and how to design them intentionally, pushed me deeper into circuit theory and how to actually design for real-world behavior.
✿ Hand Held Creative Tools for Phones gave me a whole new relationship with my phone as an expressive, programmable medium.
✿ Bio-printing & Fabrication introduced speculative biology and the possibilities of growing and printing with new materials.
✿ Intro to Fabrication was the gateway to the shop—where I learned to saw, sand, screw, and laser-cut my way into physical form. It gave me the confidence to use tools and machines I once found intimidating—now they feel like extensions of my ideas.

Each class was a puzzle piece in a toolkit I didn’t even know I needed. Now that I have it, I’m ready to keep building.

The Physical Part of Physical Computing

I’ve been joyfully sleep-deprived from soldering marathons and hours of troubleshooting. I’ve stayed up late debugging, carried half-working prototypes across campus, and constantly rediscovered stray jumper wires in bags and ..pockets. And through it all, I felt something click—a deeper sense that this is the work I’m meant to be doing.

The most unforgettable moments were the quiet ones: when a thing I built responded, moved, lit up—when it felt alive. I wandered through circuits like daydreams, let errors bloom into patterns, and built quiet machines just to see if they had something to say.

Some of my favorite projects:

Community, Chaos, and Care

ITP is more than a ‘engineering/technology meets art’ program—it’s a creative ecosystem. It runs on collaboration, curiosity, and compassion. It’s full of brilliant, weird, generous humans who make wild things and support each other every step of the way.

I’m endlessly grateful for the friendships I’ve made, the classmates who challenge me, and the professors who’ve helped me stretch in new directions. We’ve shared space, tools, snacks, breakdowns, breakthroughs—all the things that make a creative life feel full and alive.

What’s Next?

I’m already dreaming up the next odd little creation—a soft computer? A poetic machine? Something tactile and glowing and a little bit alive.
This next year will be about refining, deepening, and continuing to invent strange things with care and delight.

So here’s a chaotic little moodboard of (almost) everything I made this year. It’s messy, joyful, and brimming with circuits, stories, and experiments—from joystick-controlled lighting systems to wooden boxes filled with trinkets and tiny mechanisms; from web dashboards pulling live data from distant APIs to delicate enclosures, obsessively laser-cut from sheets of acrylic. Every project is a little experiment in curiosity—flickering, strange, sometimes stubborn, but always chasing something electric, absurd, or unexpectedly delicate. I never quite know until it’s done.

Cheers to another year of glowing ideas, joyful failures, and soft inventions. The adventure is far from over. ♡