Wei Zhou’s Blog

Wei’s portfolio: www.weizhoudesign.com

Wei’s email: weizhou@andrew.cmu.edu

Wei Zhou is a girl with ordinary dreams, to be a productive designer, a happy person,  and she wants to help others for greater good.

I grew up in China, from elementary school to high School, I was a bonely, geeky, silent, and ugly girl. Though not happy for many year, this dark age made me a strait A student in all subjects, since grade is the only thing that makes me confident. For better or worse, things changed, at the year of eighteen, I was enrolled into Tsinghua University, and suddenly I found myself become popular and chased by boys, and the underlying script is, I didn’t really study very hard at this China’s best University, and my grade drops from the 1th place, to 45th place when I graduated.

I wasted my college time on a variety of things, money-making became my priority because I eagerly wished I could paid off all my tuition all by myself.  So I worked like a horse busily involved into things like advertising design, architecture design, started up my own company and out-sourced software with lots of clients. At the same time I skipped most of my college classes. However, I think I am indeed good at exams, because I could  still get A- by average. I vividly remember I wrote my thesis paper right the day before the deadline, and surprisingly get the highest grade in final thesis defense.That was very interesting.

After a period of madness, I ended up with working at MSRA(Microsoft Research Asia), my job was to produce 3D graphics for SIGGRAPH paper demos, XBOX emped snowboarding game, etc., That was the best memory I have ever had because I was able to sit in between the creator of deep Blue, and the father of Open-GL. Everybody has a high education degree in North America’s best University, like MIT, CMU, or Stanford. They were positively leading the world’s computer science technology. And To be frank, I think I was the dummest person at MSRA back to that time. In order to change that situation, I decided to get a graduate degree in USA.

One year later, I was enrolled in Yale University’s graphic design program. Another year passed I dropped off Yale and worked in Microsoft’s  Windows shell team to develop Window’s next-generation user interface. Then I was enrolled into Carnegie Mellon University’s interaction design program. Now I am finishing this program and looking for a full-time job again.

In my free time, I like shopping, drawing and eating. I want to be a great designer.

- Wei Zhou