| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | My most memorable childhood experience was when I was shooting golf balls in my backyard when I was about eight years old. I kept shooting balls into my backyard, and I went to grab a bunch of them that I had shot that went back into a wooded area behind my house. I accidentally stepped on an underground hornet's nest, and immediately was attacked by an entire horde of hornets. Luckily, my dog growing up, a Brittany Spaniel, rushed to my side and started jumping in the air and biting the bees as I sprinted into my house. My mom was in the house and threw me in the shower to get all the bees off me. It was incredible that my dog came to my rescue and saved me from getting more badly stung, whereas his entire mouth was filled with bee stings. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | My mother, she is the most selfless individual I have ever met. She is willing to drop whatever she is doing at a moment's notice in order to help complete strangers. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire confidence in individuals. Not cockiness or brashness, but confidence in being informed and being able to speak to a specific topic with a mastery of it. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | When I played basketball in high school, I had the habit of complaining to refs a lot whenever there were bad calls. At our postseason banquet my junior year of high school, my head coach gave me a fake award to commemorate my complaining and my whole team got up and imitated me complaining to the referees. It was really funny to be the butt of the joke in front of some of my best friends. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I've always wanted to go to Australia. It combines an intriguing way of life and culture with beautiful beaches, modern cities, and also access to some untouched terrain in the Outback. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I would like to teach my children the lesson of self-reliance. My parents were tremendous and taught me so many important life lessons, but I thought my mom especially was so focused on making her kids happy, and on being the only one that could solve a problem, that I had to learn later than most the value of self-reliance. I think being able to empower kids at a young age to make choices, take accountability for those choices and their repercussions (positive and negative), and take action is really important in terms of cultivating life skills. |
