We were lucky to catch up with Andrina Zhang recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Andrina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I believe most people who are enjoying their current creative career won’t refuse to start the journey earlier, I’m one of them too. However, I’d love to share a little more about my experience and convey some peace I’ve been looking for myself if anyone else needs that as well. I always feel happy for my friends if they can find something they enjoy at younger ages. Most musicians I met started their music journey when they were little and were already very professional when I met them. I didn’t consider myself a musician until lately. I do have the idea that — it’d be great if I could start music tech / production earlier — lingers in my mind sometimes. Music Tech is the 4th subject that I’ve been trying to specialize in since the beginning of high school, and I almost can’t avoid thinking if I picked the subject “right” at the very beginning. But after trying to clear my thoughts and attribute things correctly, I did spend a lot of time exploring other things and making sure they were not for me. I may be somewhere else in another universe with other building blocks in my high school years. 16 yo me and 18 yo me both had fun, so all is fine after all.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In the later half of 2024, I’ve been a Software Engineering / Product Innovation Co-op at Bose Corporation, contributing to the next-generation features on surround / out-loud speakers, after graduating from UC San Diego with my BS in Cognitive Science and BA in Music Technology. I’m very lucky to have a great manager to mentor me and have a talented extended team of senior engineers that I can reach out to whenever I’m stuck. Outside work, I’ve been scattering my time on collaborating with others for sound projects as a contractor in Boston area or exploring production techniques on my own. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly through LinkedIn DMs or email if you’re interested in collaborating on some creative topics. Feel free to stay in tune through my LinkedIn or personal website! I’ll release projects from time to time and make posts on my social media when they are ready to go public.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Meeting the like minded artists! I love meeting other artists, no matter if we work on similar or totally different projects and sharing thoughts with each other. There’s always something new to learn through the conversations and sometimes ideas will start to grow out. It’s always great to have exciting things to come in the near future to keep life interesting. In addition, it’s also the best way I have to make new friends when I moved to a new city so far.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I have limited knowledge of NFTs, but I do think it’s a cool way for artists to sell their digital work and being able to connect to an audience group worldwide. I’ve seen artists selling their work as NFTs with different structures to design how scarce or how accessible their work is. I’m actually interested in preparing some ETH and creating my own NFTs in the future as well. I’m open to all possibilities on NFTs. However, the only thing is that I do think it’s immoral for people who are not the artists themselves to sell artists’ work as NFTs, even if they were granted permission to use the artwork “however they want” through auction or other means. There needs to be another round of conversation with the artist as I believe it’s a form transformation of the original work that’s different from the traditional ways.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://andrinazxx.github.io/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrinazxx/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrina-zhang/