About
About Me (The Fun-er Half)
Hi, the formal stuff is on the resume (or the website I suppose), but the path that brought me here is a tad harder to fit into an 8.5x11.
How’d you get into research?
I got into computational research back as a rising high school freshman mostly out of necessity. I really wanted to do research but testing my luck to find a PI who’d put a 14 year old in front of dangerous chemicals felt like a long shot. Armed with a bunch of youtube tutorials detailing the “scientific method”, I tried my hand at a science fair. Got eviscerated by judges for the first time, but importantly I learnt that there’s a world between “high-school science rigor” and “high-school science-fair rigor”.
Why Competify?
During about the same time, I heard a speech about how we should tackle the localized issues mattering most to us, because not many are going to do it for us. That inspired me to combat an issue that had been gnawing at me for a while: just how expensive competition prep was. My bestie got slowed down because he couldn’t afford prep and I hated that it felt like the leaderboards were filtering for the best-funded students.
When I’m not soiling my lab coat:
I love
- Soccer, played since elementary.
- Lil secret between us: I'm working on a new method to combine word art with origami so the text reveals itself as it unfolds. Currently have a box overflowing with “calculated” null results but you know what they say, 26th time is the charm!
I don’t love
- Automated sinks turning off mid-soap, yay for the future but this isn’t it.
- Running out of compute at the end of a 68 hr job and having to apply again just to run 2 more steps.
- Filling my room with noxious fumes and having to sleep on the couch as a kid because I wanted to make foam shapes (don't ask).
