| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | When I was a kid, we lived in a cul-de-sac and in the winter, the plow would come through and push the snow into a massive pile at the end of the cul-de-sac. It probably wasn't so big, but in my memories, it was as high and wide as the home it was piled in front of. After school, I'd tunnel into it with friends, build fortifications onto it, build extensions, and have big snowball fights. It's a very nice memory of fun winter horseplay as a kid. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I identify most with my sister. We have a similar sense of humor and we both enjoy reading a lot of books and watching a lot of TV and have pretty similar tastes. We went to the same undergrad and became best friends there. We're both thoughtful, slightly introverted people, and we both went on to pursue PhDs. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I most admire people who actually take the time and make the effort to do acts of kindness. After that I really admire people with great intelligence, but it bums me out if they use it to just make money and screw people over or wall themselves up in academia. Perhaps not "admire", but my favorite people to be around are funny people with a good sense of humor. I don't really need to agree with a person on anything if they're funny and fun to be around. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | I'm not sure if it's the funniest, but it's a funny story that me and my family like to rehash whenever we get together. I remember when I was very young, my neighbor friend got a gas-powered motorbike for his birthday. He must have been only like 5 or 6 years old. As a make-pretend type game, my siblings and his siblings all tried inventing a "super fuel" to power the motorbike, but it was just like soda and candy and grass. It broke the bike when we filled the gas tank. We were so scared about getting in trouble. But his mom, who never wanted him to get the bike (it was a gift from the ex-husband), was pretty happy that the bike was broken so we got away with it. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I'd like to do a complete exploration of Antarctica. I watched a climbing documentary where Alex Honnold and friends climbed a few of the mountains down there and it all looked really breathtaking. I figure, with unlimited money and time, I could do a lot of exploring and get to see amazing things few people have seen before. Along the same lines, if the money and especially time are truly not an issue, then I'd explore space. It's a tough choice though. I love history, so a global history tour with expert guides would be a blast. It's not my first choice though, I've gotten to see the Great Wall and the Terracotta Soldiers and the Colosseum and some others. To be honest, none of them really amazed me like natural formations do, like the Giant Sequoia or the Grand Canyon. I love food, so a tour focused on that would be cool, but that's pretty easy to do outside of this hypothetical so I wouldn't waste it on that. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I would want them to be little philosopher kings. Wise and strong. I want them to find a purpose in the world that they can pursue with passion, but not so much that they miss out on generally enjoying life. I generally want them to understand that thinking is the great gift of being human, and if you can think well, you'll probably be okay. |
