Encounter #5: Mia's Song
For this week's Encounter, I would like to share with you an original piano composition that I wrote 8 years ago entitled Mia's Song.
If you like reading, I encourage you to check out the next chapter of my Encounters story below, but if not, I hope you enjoy this week's musical Encounter! :)
Where the story begins...
I grew up in a family of mostly engineers and am an engineer by training.
I have the highest respect for engineering because I believe it is crucial to the preservation and advancement of society and yet, I think it is often overlooked and undervalued as a profession.
Despite my appreciation for engineering, I would be lying if I didn’t say that as a child, being a movie star appealed a lot more to me than being an engineer. As a movie star, you have glitz and glamour while as an engineer, all the 18- year-old-freshman-engineering-student me could envision was a future of spreadsheets and beige khakis.
My appeal to become an actress did extend beyond the veneer of Hollywood. My mother is an artist and my father publishes poetry in his free time therefore art has been a pillar in our family. I have always been drawn to the performing arts because they give me a sense of exhilaration like nothing else I know. In general, the magic of art, in whatever form it exists, has captivated me since I was young.
It amazes me how art is born within the walls of an individual’s mind and yet it somehow is able to extend and transcend beyond all boundaries to touch the souls and imaginations of the masses, making them feel and inspiring them. This ability to connect with humanity and impact it in a meaningful and beautiful way is what always drew me to the arts and what continuously tugged on my heart strings as I proceeded steadily down the road to become an Engineer.
The academic path for me to become an Engineer was paved by my older sister and there wasn’t much questioning of it because of rationale and money. You attend a specialized science high school in order to get into a good engineering university because an engineering profession offers security and stability. You trade in the exciting but expensive “college experience” advertised in pamphlets of colleges far away from your parents to attend a university in your parents’ backyard because tuition is free so college loans are a foreign concept.
It may seem at first that I reluctantly became an engineer and that my heart wasn't in it. To be honest, there were times during my challenging chemical engineering undergraduate experience, that I wondered that myself. Was I doing the engineering only because I was too scared to take on the unpredictable and challenging life of a professional artist? (The term starving artist usually came to mind). However, after 2 engineering degrees and a few years of work experience under my belt, I have come to realize that I ultimately made the decision to become an engineer, not out of robotic obligation to my parents’ desire for my security but instead, out of the obligation I feel I have to society. The world desperately needs engineers and scientists therefore I strongly believe that if you have the capabilities to become one, it is one of the best ways to give back to society.
Fortunately, I have found a career in engineering that truly excites me. From my job, I have come to realize that engineering is not so different from the arts that I love. Despite what I used to think, engineering is not technically dry and stuffy. There is a humanity to its purpose and a drama to its accomplishments.
Nonetheless, stoichiometry doesn’t quite soothe the soul like music or dance. There has always been a part of me that needs to create and perform. In my early 20s, I decided to stop telling myself that my identity was limited to one mold – that of the Engineer - and instead allowed myself to explore my identity in the arts.
With this decision to break my mold, the biggest question for me was how I could allow the dichotomy of the Artist and Engineer to harmoniously co-exist.
At first, I thought I had to choose so that is why after engineering graduate school, I decided to pursue acting full time. I took classes, got headshots, took part in student films, and was in an off-Broadway play. It was a fun experience and it exposed me to both the good and bad of being a working actor. Although I loved the acting world and the Encounters that I had in it, I did not feel like all of who I was fit into that mold. I missed the engineering world where I got to be the serious and nerdy problem solver so I returned to engineering and found my calling in the field of garbage (literally).
Although returning to engineering closed the curtain on the performer side of me for the past 2 years, I knew in the back of my mind that I would extend a hand to the performer once again, the only question was: How?