| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | My childhood home, which I lived in until I was 11, had a shallow creek that ran around the perimeter of our property. All of the kids in our neighborhood, including myself, used to play in this creek for hours on end. More specifically, it ran under a bridge on our street where we all created a fort and spent the bulk of our summer vacations hiding there from our parents. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | Being an only child with zero first cousins, you could say I come from an extremely small family; nevertheless, I believe I identify the most with my mother. She instilled the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to me at a very young age, which led to us sharing a lot of the same values and social ideals as each other. My parents also had a very modest upbringing, so she taught me to never take anything I have for granted. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | Important characteristics that I look for in an individual are a good sense of humor, humility, humbleness, confidence, uniqueness, self-motivation, and intelligence. Intelligence is always an important trait, but it's a person's desire to want to learn more about what they don't know that I admire the most. All of these traits are good descriptors for my parents, so I most likely attribute these qualities to the friends I try to surround myself with in life. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | After working my way through college delivering food, I decided it would be funny to get a tattoo of a slice of pepperoni pizza. That tattoo has gotten me free meals, introduced me to new friends, and it was the key ice-breaker when I first met my wife |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I would love to travel across East Asia; specifically South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, mainland China, etc. because my undergraduate concentration was East Asian studies and I never had the chance to visit for financial reasons. My college coursework included a great deal of art history, so I spent a large amount of time studying at the Sackler-Freer museum in Washington, D.C. Being able to visit the locations where their famous religious pieces were created has been a dream of mine since my early twenties. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | My wife and I are in the early stages of starting our own family, so this topic has been at the forefront of our minds for a while now. One of the reasons we were attracted to each other early on in our relationship was due to the fact that we both treated other people – friends, family, strangers, etc. – with a high level of respect and kindness. We believe that you should always treat others as you wish to be treated yourself, so we hope to instill this trait in any children we might have down the road. |
