This is me standing next to Cristopher Yoo back in 2017 after our team won the Cal State Chess Championship. Cristopher Yoo would later go on to become the youngest Grandmaster in America. I no longer compete in tournaments regularly, but chess is still something I enjoy playing as a hobby. My current FIDE rating is 1737.
This is me after finishing the 2024 Philadelphia Half-Marathon. I did cross-country competitively in high school and have kept up with it since. I also enjoy biking and swimming and hope to soon compete in a triathlon.
This is me in San Francisco after participating in a caligraphy competition for non-native Chinese speakers. I more or less won by default because there hardly are any non-native Chinese speakers! It's a very difficult language, but I really enjoy learning it. I'm quite interested in Chinese history and culture — I've been to China twice and hope to go again. I minored in Chinese as an undergraduate and am still actively studying the language as much as I can, reading Chinese news articles and having conversations with my Chinese friends.
Here I am inside of the Bike Share Basement at Haverford College. I revived the bike share program on campus, growing the fleet of bikes from 5 to 50. It was a fun weekly project where we fixed up old bikes for students to use at no cost. Once I graduated I left the program in capable hands, now my interest in biking is purely recreational. I enjoy mountain biking and long distance road cycling. Recently I did a trip where I biked all the way from Cleveland to Annapolis on the Gap Trail, biking 600 miles over the course of nine days.
I have been fascinated by geography since I was very young. I had a huge collection of atlases and maps that I would copy by hand, eventually becoming good enough to reproduce these maps entirely from memory. As I became older, my interest in geography became more data-driven. This motivated me to start a YouTube page where I made videos on a variety of geography related subjects, where I gained 2.5k subscribers and over 400k views. More recently, I've leveraged this interest in a more professional setting in my Research Assistant role at the University of Pennsylvania, where I process large amounts of geospatial data for training ecological risk machine learning models.