WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL?

I grew up in Hillsborough, CA, and attended Crystal Springs Uplands School for both middle- and high-school. I came to Cal after I almost-randomly decided to major in EECS, and I've been in love with it ever since.

HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)

I know the standard 61 series languages as well as MATLAB and Verilog (that one shouldn't really count), and I'm learning Python. I've had several coding projects in research, but I've never worked at a software company. 

WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES

Does TAing count? I TA'd 61C last Spring, and in the Fall I was the first-ever undergraduate TA for EE 126 (a class every EECS major should take). I also REALLY enjoy video games. 

As far as less sedentary hobbies go, I like hiking, backpacking, and biking (especially at Tahoe), and when the semester's not at its hardest points I go to the gym regularly. I also tried basketball and swimming for short periods. In high-school I played tennis as well as the trumpet.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS

I can whistle with my hands pretty well and I can do handstand push-ups. I'm also really talented at annoying my big sister, and I used to be really good at Counter-Strike. My most useful ability would have to be my ability to not sleep very much.

HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU?

I'm head-over-heels for my girlfriend of 6+ years (I had a crush on her for a year more than that), and I'd say she's pretty memorable :)

I've also climbed half dome...

Most of my memorable stuff has happened right here at Cal: I've had the chance to put MapReduce into 61A (still ironing that out), make a parallelism lab for 61C, make a project for the new CS 194-2, and overhaul all the analog amplifier labs for EE 105 (they were so bad, not like the powerglove). I'm also the student representative on a committee to move more probability material into the lower-div EECS curriculum, in the form of a new EECS 26 course or a revised CS70. I'd definitely put TAing on that list of most-memorable things: it's the greatest!

WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER?

On the class side of things, most of my work will come from Stat 251 (Stochastic Calculus), CS 281B (Advanced Topics in Learning), and CS 294-34 (Practical Machine Learning). I'll also be spending time on my research project with Martin Wainwright as well as a project to make a new revision of the 61C parallelism lab. I think I'll be spending some time visiting graduate schools, so I might have to disappear from the Friday lab on some weeks.