I was born and raised in Southern California, spending the majority of my life in the city of Irvine, which is where I call home. I grew up only knowing weather that consisted of sunny but cloudy skies with temperatures never going below freezing with a dash of rain here and there. With weather like that, spending time outdoors was a given, and naturally I enjoyed playing sports, such as baseball and basketball, as well as camping as a Boy Scout. Like any sane person who spends that many years in one locale, seeing the same old everyday, I made it my goal to experience life outside of the only place I had ever knonwn, and with college admissions coming up as a senior in high school, I couldn't pass on that opportunity and therefore heavily applied to schools on the east coast, eventually settling on matriculating to New York University (NYU) in the Empire State.

Before my departure for the Big Apple, I was afforded an opportunity that summer to study abroad in the coastal city of Santander, an idyllic town situated along the northern coast of Spain. While still in my late teens, I was completely mesmorised by its culture, absorbing as much as I could during my 3 month stay there. I saw, live and in person, the "Running of the Bulls" in Pamplona, made famous by the novels of Ernest Hemmingway, took some weekend excursions to travel to Paris, Ibiza, and Lisbon, and even snuck into a Davis Cup tennis match between Spain and some other country. It was a life-changing trip, without question, and it was one of the reasons why I chose to pursue a double major in Spanish and Economics.

Now, there are certain dates which will always live in infamy, such as December 7th, 1941 (Pearl Harbor) and September 11th, 2001 (9/11). It was the latter date, however, which would have the most profound effect on me, not only because it was a moment in history that changed the lives of every American, but rather because I found myself only 2 miles away from Ground Zero when the first plane exploded into the World Trade Center, cementing my status as an unwilling participant in some urban war whose ramifications were visible everywhere upon peeking through my bedroom window on the 9th floor of a NYU dormitory tower on 3rd Avenue and 10th Street in lower Manhattan. But through this soul-shaking event, the type of which tends to always unite and rally everyone to a common cause, that I began to feel like I had imprinted a part of myself upon the rubble that once was the symbol of the financial district in New York City, and vice versa.