Hobbies
Reading, playing cello, listening to strange and beautiful music, attempting to write strange and beautiful music, cooking food, eating food, sleeping.

Clubs
School orchestra, youth symphony, Science Bowl team, string quartet.

Experience
Science Bowl, AMC-AIME, CTY/SET.

Biography
This is the point where I'm supposed to say something profound about a deep interest in physics related to a Platonic desire to explain the universe from its most basic fundamentals. That's certainly part of it, I think, but I might not have ever noticed all of the Platonic beauty of science had I not as an impressionable four-year-old found a copy of ``A Brief History of Time'' on the bookcase. I remember my obsession with that book more clearly than most of the rest of my early childhood, and it appears to have made an indelible mark on my life. Whenever I'm up late with homework and ask myself whether I'm doing physics out of sheer masochism, I remember the little pictures of the astronaut and the alarm clock and the black hole, and the joy of the subject comes back to me.

I spent years doing what one might call ``partial homeschooling'' with my dad in math and science, and then started taking physics classes at the university about two years ago. I've been through a lot of very fascinating classes, including mechanics, some E&M, thermodynamics, biophysics, quantum mechanics, solid-state and atomic physics. I'm also in this graduate-level quantum mechanics course this semester, which has been challenging and labor-intensive and very fun.

On a more personal level---I'm 15, tall enough, and come from a small town where they grow a lot of wheat. Last time I checked, my social life was still breathing. I listen to bands too numerous to name, and I'm in a string quartet that occasionally earns a little cash. Recently I tried to teach myself Tuvan throat-singing. I pass quite a bit of time entertaining my three younger siblings and cooking large quantities of food. During the summers I putter around pretending to fix up our old Queen Anne house. Most of the time I can be found wearing a hat.

I look forward to meeting you all in a few weeks!