Hobbies
Cooking, Table Tennis, Playing the Violin

Clubs
Quiz Bowl Team

Experience
N/A

Biography
Born in Honolulu in 1987, I have lived in Germany, Central Virginia, and Northern Virginia, where my family’s peregrinations have come to an end. I don’t remember all that much about my childhood, that dark and blurry time before I could read English or employ even differential calculus, but it included one event that commenced my longstanding relationship with that most elegant of the sciences, physics.
Sometime around the age of six, I saw the movie Top Gun (a consummate work of modern cinema, I might add), and was very much impressed by the sound track, the loud noises, the jet engines, the trash talking, and the cool call signs (Goose was my favorite, may he rest in peace). I was, in fact, so impressed that I decided then and there that I wanted to become a fighter pilot. My parents told me that my height at adulthood might exclude me from such an occupation (a wise deception), and thoughtfully suggested I consider a career in aerospace engineering instead. I bought that, and knowing such work would involve physics, went to check out a children’s book on relativity at the library. Several well illustrated thought experiments and a cool graphic of the rubber sheet model later, I was hooked. Since then I have been an avid, though somewhat mediocre student of math, and my physics class this year has turned me into a voracious, significantly better than mediocre student of that subject.
A small measure of modesty and a greater dearth of impressive achievements require that I not rattle off a string of awards and honors, but rather list here those things that I care about and enjoy: my school’s well-traveled quiz bowl team, of which I am co-captain and tournament director; the violin, of which I am a semi-mediocre student; classical music, of which Bach and Mozart are my favorite composers; American cinema, be it plebeian (Top Gun) or slightly more cultured (Casablanca); table tennis, in which I play a basement-owning, but relatively uncompetitive two-winged looping game; poetry, of which I enjoy Frost, Pope, Eliot, and Verlaine; drama, of which I prefer Wilder and O’Neill; cooking, in which classic French and Southern Italian are my favorite cuisines; and not the least physics, especially as explained by Richard Feynman, David Griffiths and my teacher, Dr. John Dell. I am looking forward to this camp, and to semesters upon semesters spent studying this beautiful subject.