So you want to know a little bit about me. Well, you've asked for it. Here goes. Don't say I didn't warn you...

As most stories do, I'll start at the beginning. At first, all was dark. Then, there was an explosion of energy and matter. Scientists call that the Big Bang.

OK, Ok, ok...I'll jump to the pertinent part...

I was born one (probably hot, humid, and generally unpleasant) summer day in 1974 in the Washington Adventist Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. At the time, my immediate family consisted of my parents, my older brother, and myself. As a matter of fact, it still does. I spent the earliest part of my childhood in College Park, Maryland. Unfortunately, I don't have all that many fond memories of the place because, well, I was too young to remember much more than the traumatic incidents of the time.

My family moved to Rockville, Maryland, when I was around 5. We stayed there until I was entering the 4th grade. At that point, my parents moved us to Bethesda, Maryland (yes, I did in fact spend the first 18 years of my life in Maryland). Honestly, the reason for this was to get my brother and myself into the better public schools in the area (which, coincedently, meant getting us into one of the better public schools in the nation).

In the midst of this shifting around, I was developing into a rather precocious and sometimes obnoxious (well, probably oftentimes obnoxious, especially if you were to listen to my brother) youngster. I've been assured that I've matured nicely, though I can backslide on occasion. Anyway, around the time we first moved to Rockville, I became very interested in the big musical instrument that my brother was being forced into learning to play. With enough persuasion (which probably involved a bit of whining), I, too, got to enjoy the pleasures of the pianoforte. Much to the annoyance of my brother, I seemed to have enough talent so as to not require quite as much practice time as he did. Eventually, he stopped. I'm still playing (although not half as well as I should be, had I practiced nearly as much as I ought to have--isn't that always the case?). I also began to get interested in cooking and baking, so for those of you who were wondering, this was when it all began.

Midway through our sojourn in Rockville, my family discovered Scouting. Cub Scouts, Webelos, Boy Scouts. You name it, we did it. Even after moving to Bethesda, we stayed with our Rockville-based troop (1450). My brother was a highly respected member of the troop, taking on many responsibilities and earning his Eagle rank. My dad was an Assistant Scoutmaster. I followed in their footsteps in terms of respectability and responsibility, but I never ended up finishing my Eagle--I ran out of time afer getting Life rank after having taken a year's sabbatical (yes, you can get burnt out of Scouting).

When we were in Rockville, both my brother and I went to Chinese school. Quite honestly, neither of us was all that interested, and we both came up with numerous schedule conflicts to skip days of school. We eventually quit (my parents decided that it was fiscally irresposible to pay for classes to which we were not going). However, we have both somewhat regretted our earlier decisions, as I took up Chinese classes in high school (never getting back my earlier proficiency), and he took some in college. Maybe one of these days, if I have the time, I'll get back to learning Chinese. It was also during our stint in Chinese school that both my brother and I developed our interests in martial arts, table tennis, and badminton. Unfortunately, we have kept up with just about none of them.

In moving to a new school in Bethesda (I'd been accepted to a "magnet gifted and talented program"), a couple of things happened. First, I found myself in a class of intellectual and academic peers, thus putting a serious lid on my swelling ego. Secondly, I decided that I wanted to play the violin. After some more persuasion (probably also involving whining and other promises), my parents rented a violin for me and let me enroll in the public school instrumental music program. Thirdly, it was in these years that I met some of my best friends--people with whom I'm still in contact.

Bethesda was to be my home for the next 8 years, as I went on from Burning Tree Elementary to Thomas W. Pyle Intermediate and, finally, Walt Whitman High School. I was able to keep up with the music most of the time, taking private lessons in piano all the way through high school, and private lessons in violin through the beginning of my 10th grade. I was a four-year member of my high school's orchestras (first year in concert, next three in symphonic). We were actually quite good, or at least the county, state, and competition judges seemed to think so. Aside from the one year sabbatical, I was also holding down some sort of position or the other in my Scout troop. The other extra-curricular activity which I did, and which has become much more of an interest than ever it was in high school, was volleyball. I'd learned how to play from some friends (who were much better than I all the way through high school) back after 7th grade. Along with a couple of these friends, I made the school's JV co-ed team in my sophomore year, and varsity men's team in my junior and senior years. Well, enough about high school.

The next major stage in my life was, naturally, college. In this case, I went to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. About 2500 miles away from DC. This was good. I still kept up a schedule which most people deemed insane. Aside from a classload that tended on the heavy side, I still kept up with music, volleyball, and a part-time job. I became a member of the Caltech Men's Volleyball Club and played two years of A to AA competition, then two years of intercollegiate. I also became an assistant coach to the Caltech Women's Volleyball team, a position which I held for 3 years. As for music, I played in chamber music groups throughout my stay at Caltech, and probably was the only pianist to go through four years without playing a piece composed before 1840 (I'd done my obligatory Baroque stint on the violin, not that I have anything against Baroque music). The part-time job was working as a waiter at the Athenaeum, a faculty club on campus. This meant I was doing a bit more than brushing elbows with some of the finest minds in the world--I was cleaning up after them (of course, the selfsame honor goes to the fine custodians (oops, maintenance engineers) of the institution). I ended up becoming a student captain there, which meant that it was part of my job to nitpick the service quality of the staff. Needless to say, this means that I'm not always the most fun person to go out with to restaurants (although some say it can be randomly exciting...)!

So now I'm at Stanford for graduate work in Materials Science. Hopefully, I'll get a PhD out of this. Even more to the point, hopefully I'll get a job. But it will be exciting nonetheless.

There, you've made it. That wasn't too painful now, was it?