| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | My most memorable experience from childhood is when I moved to a different country for the first time. It was a mind-opening experience for me as a kid to find myself in a community different from the one I grew up in and to learn about different ways of life. Living around the world completely changed my direction in life and helped me gain new perspectives that I am so grateful for. Connecting with other people, getting out of my comfort zone, seeing the world, and challenging the biases of my original community were incredibly important were invaluable experiences that I am so glad to have had from a young age. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I identify myself most closely with my maternal grandmother. She is incredibly hardworking, always positive and friendly, and she goes above and beyond to make things special for everyone. She paved her path herself through her own determination. As the matriarch of the family, she has continued to bring everyone together and raised a great group of good people. I identify with her the most because she priorities family and never stops trying to do the right thing. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire kindness, intellectual curiosity, openness, drive, awareness, and respectfulness as character traits. I especially connect well with those that have the "ability to see the bigger picture," so I really admire those that are able to zoom out and think about things at higher levels. People who are passionate are also admirable to me. I find it really inspiring to see people work towards their passions and being motivated by those passions. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | There are tons of funny memories from college of my friends and I getting into unexpected travel adventures, but I'll pick a memory from childhood instead. In elementary school - probably 4th or 5th grade - my friends and I started a "military" game, complete with ranks, assignments, promotions, and more. It started small with just our friend group, and we kept recruiting the kids on the playground to join the group. Eventually, I had become the leader of the group, and we had recruited almost everyone at recess to the group, with a whole bunch of different roles and ranks for everyone - everyone except for two kids we were friends with who wanted to jump rope instead. At one point I directed everyone in this large "army" of 15-20 kids to do training by running laps around the area. I stayed back as they all went running, but they all ended up running straight through our two friends' jump rope while they were using it. One of the teachers was upset, and everyone was put into "timeout," where they weren't able to play. Even though I technically had not done it, and didn't tell the group to run through the jump rope, I was put into timeout too, for the longest time out of everyone. Thinking back on it, the whole thing seems hilarious to me, and I think of it as a lesson that stuck with me on the consequences of being a "leader" and responsibility for the actions of others. I still occasionally talk to those old friends who were jump roping, and we always laugh about how ridiculous the whole thing was and can't believe how it managed to happen. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | If time and money were not an issue, I would travel to the far reaches of the universe. The possibilities of discovery and scientific understanding that are out in distant galaxies are fascinating to me, and I would love to learn what more there is to know about the universe. More realistically, back down here on Earth, I would like to do more traveling in South America or perhaps to Papua New Guinea. In both cases, the different individual indigenous cultures and languages in those reasons are incredibly interesting and I would love to know more about them. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | If I have children, I would like to pass on an appreciation for learning about other people and cultures, a sense of decency and respect towards others, and a conception of responsibility for taking care of your communities and environment. I would hope to share the experience and knowledge that I have learned from so that they might continue building on those lessons and discovering even more about the world, if they wish. I would encourage them to be open-minded and always keep learning. |
