About Me.

I spent the first years of my life living on a family farm in southwest Ohio. We had chickens, a couple of dogs, and 75 wooded acres in which to get lost. The property was littered with ramshackle barns filled with old tractors and horse-drawn farm tools, a rusty museum of two centuries worth of farming history. For a curious and carefree kid, it was heaven. I was in part homeschooled by my father, a teacher by trade, and I also spent three days a week at a homeschool co-op. The co-op had small, age-diverse classes, with core tenets of learning through play and following interest-driven coursework. In this environment, I took my first steps towards engineering in my class titled ‘How Things Work’. After school, I would come home and rummage through the barns, looking for a broken lawnmower or a minifridge to deconstruct. While I was oblivious to my luck that this was considered ‘homework’, this environment allowed me to explore failure in a low-risk setting and fostered my curiosity and joy of tinkering.

 

At age ten, my family uprooted our farm life and moved to a small town in Tasmania, Australia. My mother worked as a rural family doctor, and with the nearest 9-12 school over an hour’s drive away, my parents opted to send me to a Quaker boarding school in the capital city of Hobart. The transition from Ohio cornfields to a boarding school blazer and tie was initially jarring, but I am fortunate that I had loving and supportive parents, teachers who were invested in my learning, and a tight-knit boarding house community. Despite Tasmania being the geographic end of the line, the boarding house was home to people from a dozen countries. We spoke different languages and observed different traditions, and each person there helped to expand my worldview. The boarding house celebrated diversity and encouraged cultural curiosity. These people became my family unit as we all navigated the universal struggles of high school as hormonal teenagers. I came away from this period of my life deeply appreciative for the strength that comes from diverse communities and experiences.

 

I was recruited out of high school to attend and row at UC Berkeley, where my grandfather had rowed in the class of 1934. When I walked into that boathouse, I felt an immense privilege to follow in the footsteps of national titles and Olympic gold medals. My fellow student-athletes came from around the world to row at Cal, and we built our own team culture of excellence and unity. Each practice instilled in us discipline, camaraderie, and a tireless drive to compete. I wholly credit my work ethic and team skills to the time spent on this team. While I experienced success in rowing in my first two years, my focus drifted away from the classroom, and my grades suffered. I made a difficult decision to step away from the team for six months during my junior year, and I committed myself to learning. I applied my athletic work ethic to academics,  and attended office hours, got to know my professors, and leaned into the rigour of academics at Cal. My time as a rower made me an accountable, dedicated, and selfless team member, and I carry these traits into every team of which I am a part.

 

In the months before March 2020, I was looking for a change and was drawn to the adventure and seemingly endless possibilities of the ‘van-life’. When COVID hit, my wife and I purchased an empty cargo van, drove across the country, and returned to the place it had all started - the Ohio farm. I had little practical knowledge of plumbing, carpentry, or electrical, but with an eagerness to learn, conversations with handy friends, and a whole lot of Youtube tutorials, the most ambitious project of my life began to come together. I designed and built the van with many of the comforts of home and approached it like a large optimization problem; I was maximizing the accessibility and multi-functionality of each system in the van, and minimizing the weight and volume. I put in regular 14-hour days through the humid summer heat, but the tangibility and progress I saw from my efforts was deeply gratifying. After four months, the build was finished, and the curiosity and wonder I had once felt from a childhood spent tinkering on the farm had returned. Seeing first-hand the importance of cohesive systems in the van build, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career that allowed me to design and build better mechanical products. I set out on the path to graduate school, seeking increasingly technical roles, taking prerequisites, and falling back in love with learning about How Things Work.