I was born in a blizzard, so say my parents. It was a cold April night in Chicago when my parents ate a last minute dinner of Chinese food, just in time for my life to begin. Needless to say, to this day I am fond of both international cuisine and cold weather (well, at least the former).

The first few years of life were tough, if I remember correctly. As if learning an entire language and going through half of Piaget’s stages was not enough, the springtime temperature changes in the Windy City just proved too rigorous for my young respiratory system. So me and the ‘rents packed our bags and headed west, to an altogether insanely sunny place called Phoenix, apparently the king of all cities. Long story short, we soon moved again after the birth of my sister, Tami, and followed the herds even further west, to a mythical (yet highly overpopulated) place called California.

Skip ahead to high school, where I ran and studied in the suburban town of Chino Hills, 30 miles west of the City of Angels (Los Angeles, duh). By the by, Chino Hills has a new claim to fame, aside from housing the infamous Snoop Doggy Dogg: if you’re a fan of the hit Fox TV show The OC, you’ll be pleased to realize that the character from the “ghetto” comes from Chino, the neighboring city to my hometown (which is not a ghetto by any means).

Anyway, after high school I attended the University of California at San Diego and after a year or so decided to study the field of Cognitive Science, a great major for someone who has NO idea what they want to do after college. After taking a few required HCI courses, I decided to dive in head first and take a class called Cognitive Engineering. In this class I fell in love with a process called Contextual Design (motivated by the book Contextual Design by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt) and built a prototype of a piece of software called PictureThis!, which would be used to organize digital photo collections. I loved this class for three distinct reasons:

1) I worked harder than I had in any class before and had an amazing time in the process
2) I was part of a team that created a piece of work that was far greater than I ever could have expected
3) And finally, the bonds I formed with my teammates still exist, and these were people I did not know at all at the outset of the project.

The results of this project led me to the decision to continue my study of HCI because I would like to professionally create friendly, efficient, effective, and (most importantly) humble products for people to use in their everyday lives.

Now, fast forward to the present. I have relocated from a slightly conservative city (SD) in a very liberal state (CA) to a liberal town (Bloomington) in a slightly conservative state (IN). The differences between here and home abound, and it will no doubt take time to become accustomed to life in the Midwest, but at the same time I am excited beyond belief about this opportunity. How often does one get a chance to completely start over, with only the hint of a future occupation in mind? Rarely. Nine days after trekking more than 2500 miles, I find myself in the perfect academic program: one that will demand that I get my hands dirty and experience the challenges and rewards of real design. I can’t wait.