1. 1550 Owens Store Road
Canton, GA 30115
4/12/12
Judges, Senior Project
Creekview High School 1550
Canton, GA 30115
Dear Judges:
Hello, my name is Jesse White. The need to inform you all of my goals has been
delivered to me by the powers that be. Yet however wonderful that idea is, the truth is that
the furthest I can see ahead of my present is an impressive and altogether astounding vision
of five minutes. However if I must name a goal, it would be that of graduation. More
importantly though is that my choice of Senior Project is to build a computer; the focus of
the project may have inadvertently strayed from this idea however. Somewhere along the
line, woodworking interposed itself between me and building that computer.
My project is still a computer, make no mistake, I just happened to build it into an
oak something. It really is just a box, but it is still nonetheless a very pretty box. Now to
link this thing to my research paper is in all honesty a stretch. I researched and wrote on
Alan Turing and his Universal Turing Machine by making loose comparisons between his
idea of an ‘infinite tape’ and modern data storage theory. I do not have the space to
describe it in more detail, but I more or less examined just a single part of his ideas in order
to put forth that he is essentially the father of all modern computing. It is here that I have a
link connecting my research to my project. I have researched the theoretical father of
computers and I have built a modern computer. I, however informative my research was, I
did not learn any information that aided in the completion of my project. All information
that I required on computing had already been accumulated in past personal projects. That
does not mean I did not have struggles though. I have discovered the arduous tasks of the
craftsman, while continuing to despair at the ability of the computer to utterly confound.
Now the arduous task of the craftsman for me is that woodworking is meticulous, and I
realize now that I did not quite appreciate the level of patience I would have to employ in
the endeavor. Despite my rashness I did not make any mistakes that were outright
unsalvageable, and managed to scrape together something that I am proud of. The
computer portion was largely much easier than its counterpart, but there was one point that
did frustrate me to no end that did take a good deal of effort to overcome.
The relation of my project to a career is not a relation of one to one but of one to
many. It can be directly related to not merely one career, but the entire field of Information
Technology and also the career of the carpenter. My research on the other hand only
relates to Information Technology in general, being that it was essentially a lecture on a
single foundation of the entire field. What I learned about myself is that I am impatient. I

2. find it absurd that I surprise myself through my own impatience. It should have been
obvious, but then again I suppose it had never really mattered before now. I also learned
that I like staining wood. Go figure. In the vein of pursuing this career, my outlook has not
changed. At least, it has not changed in a way as to be perceivable to myself. I look
forward to working in the IT field, and I will not shy from the notion of woodworking. I do
have doubts on taking up woodworking as a career though.
On the Senior Project as a whole, I dislike the entire enterprise with a passion. I
find the program near worthless. My reasoning for such a belief is sound, yet for the sake
of a brevity that I have already disregarded I will not voice my specific causes for
discontent. Despite my misdemeanor, I do find that you, my judges, deserve the greatest
thanks. I would not be able to sit through this event and remain pleasant.
Sincerely,
Jesse White