About Me
“Just like the iron
ore in Australia”
My flatmate likes to say that I’m just like the iron ore that people mine in Australia -- I was dug out of Australia, shipped to China (Hong Kong, in my case), where I was repackaged and exported to the US.
More seriously, I was born in Sydney, Australia, but grew up in Hong Kong, where I went to Kowloon Junior School and then King George V School. I then attended Princeton University, where I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Physics. I am now a Ph.D. candidate at MIT.
In my spare time, I love to swim, run, and ski (not simultaneously!). I used to play the violin, but now I enjoy my music as a listener (mostly classical, soundtrack, new age, musicals, and some mainstream pop stuff too, although a lot of what I like in that category is embarrassingly girly...)
I like to live life according to what I call the Astronaut Mentality. From an email I wrote to a friend explaining it:
If you’re looking for my CV, it’s here.
About Me
“The idea is that you should approach life the same way a professional astronaut does. If something goes wrong (and something WILL -- it's silly to go into something assuming that there'll be no obstacles) then just remember that you've trained hard for this mission, and that you're well-equipped to deal with the trouble, even if it doesn't seem that way at first. So just calmly deal with the problems one at a time, and don't worry about problems that don't exist. And if there does end up being a problem you can't fix, the most important thing is to be able to move on psychologically: it's crucial that the unsolved problem doesn't haunt you and affect your subsequent performance.”
