I often felt small at Stanford. Although this feeling was much more intense at the beginning, it persisted throughout my time there. But one incident made feel not too small.
A filmmaking techniques class was one of my most enjoyable classes. We watched movies most of the class. What could be more enjoyable than that? But wasn�t this a strange class to take, since my degree was Computer Science and my concentration was Human-Computer Interaction? What had this class got to do with computers? We learned to apply these film-making techniques in the computer interface and interaction.
The class reminded me of something I had noticed in movies. Sometimes, before the visual of the next scene is shown, the audio (of the next scene) starts first. For example, in a scene from The Longest Day, a French paratrooper knifed a German sentry guarding a railroad. Instead of hearing the screams of the German soldier, we hear the whistle of an approaching train. However, the visual of the scene remains the same (that of the German soldier being knifed). Then the visual scene changes to that of a train exploding, with German soldiers exiting the train. So the audio of the subsequent scene (train whistle) precedes the visual (train exploding).
While walking towards class from one of our weekly informal meetings with our professor at a coffeehouse (for those who know Stanford, it was at Tressider Union), I shared the above observation with him. He listened intently.
At the start of the class, the professor described this observation. He asked the class the purpose for such an effect. As expected, Stanford students, being so brainy, gave several excellent explanations. The Professor rounded up the discussion by suggesting that the purpose was to emphasize the close connection between the two scenes. In The Longest Day scenes, it was to show that the knifed German soldier (from first scene) was guarding the exploding train (from second scene).
At that moment, I was happy to have contributed to the class by sharing my observation with the professor. But it was his next comment that made me feel a little proud of myself. He said he was very pleased that one of us (ahem!) had made such an observation. He had been teaching us film techniques for the past half quarter (or the past five or six weeks), and one of us could now notice such effects.
Nobody in the class knew that the professor was referring to me. The exception was a great Jewish friend who was sitting next to me in class. When I told her about it, she replied with a smile and said, �Wow, that was cool."
At that moment, I felt like a small boy praised by his teacher. Psychologists say that we have this �little boy or girl� in each of us. So you could say that what I felt was the �little boy� in me wanting his teacher�s approval.
But more than that, I felt I might offer something to Stanford University after all. Maybe, just maybe, I might be a little more intelligent than I had thought. Maybe in small ways I - even I - can fit into the intellectual climate at Stanford. |
