| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | What stands out most to me from my childhood isn’t necessarily a handful of individual events, but collective experiences. Summer has always been my favorite season, and my fondest memories reflect that. If I have to be specific, I’d say playing baseball from youth leagues to competitive leagues through high school embodies my most memorable childhood experiences. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | I would say I identify closely with my father. From an early age he instilled a curiosity about nature, the universe, and mathematics in me, which has had a huge influence on what I’m doing and what I’m interested in today. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I admire someone who is goal-oriented. I admire someone who is honest with themselves in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses, will set ambitious but attainable goals, and will relentlessly try to attain them. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | Maybe it wasn’t funny to me at the time, but my freshman year of high school I was playing piano in a concert in my school’s theatre. Being thirteen years old and full of nervous energy, I was fidgeting around awaiting my turn to play and rolled my sheet music into the shape of a cylinder. When it came time for me to perform, everything started out fine, until a couple pages in when the sheet music suddenly remembered the shape that I put it in earlier and began to curl up. I tried to flatten the music back up while playing, but soon it was apparent that I was going to lose the battle as the music started to fall. Luckily, a friend near the stage saw what was happening and sprinted up to hold the pages open for me for the rest of the piece. I learned a valuable lesson that day: always memorize your music! |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | Given that time and money are no issue, I’m inclined to pick a place I’m not sure I’ll ever have the time and money to visit. I would choose to travel to Antarctica. Touring the coast and taking in the rich marine ecosystem, then trekking across the vast, bleak, beautiful frozen expanse of the interior would certainly be a memorable and unique trip. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I’d like to pass on some advice that I wish I had learned at an earlier age. You may be good at a lot of things, but if you want to be great at one of them it’s going to take a lot of hard work, and there’s no shortcutting that. |
