Yiming Tong

Before applying to my Master's programme, I had a long confusion period. I knew with certainty that I didn't want to do nuclear engineering related work, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. Looking into myself, I am a person who needs passion as well as interest as a motivation. But there are so many things I'm interested in, scientific research, art, manga, games, I seem to be interested in all of them, but can interests really be a future career direction, and how long can I keep my love for them?

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With this confusion, I decided to take a step first. If I wasn't sure how long my love would last, then I'd give it a try! So I applied to Leiden University, an innovative Master's programme. During my first year, I tried everything I wanted to do. I wrote a few papers and realised that I enjoyed doing innovative academic projects but writing papers was a real pain. I took art-related lecture and joined some activities, and realised that my favourite art style might be classical art, and I found it a bit confusing to understand some new art styles nowadays. I tried to learn how to draw, and found that I liked the storytelling and storyboard in creating manga, but I wasn't really passionate about the actual drawing itself.

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Then I tried making my own games. Although it was very rough at first, I felt a special "moment" when I saw how players reacted to it. In my second year, I took a lot of game-related courses and worked on four game projects. I met a lot of problems in the process, technical, teamwork, and design... However, the more I tried, the more energy I gained, every difficulty I encountered turned into experience for my next project, and turned into a weapon that made players feel joyful.

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In my final semester, for my own graduation project, I also chose to use the game approach for my research. I feel like I've found what I want to do, and for that reason, I couldn't wait for what's next. This time I want to bring smiles to more players, just as games have brought me these past few years.