About Me
This is harder than I would have thought. Go on, you try writing about yourself. It's all too easy to fall into George Michael (AD, not the singer) -esque "I'm 5' 11, Caucasian", etc. (I'm almost 6' 1", and only half caucasian, btw). So I'll just focus on getting something out here -- if I do a little bit of work on the web site every day, eventually it'll get decent, right? After all, it's said that a journey of a thousand steps results in a single mile. Or something like that.So I guess I'll work backwards. I currently work at Lazard Capital Markets, a finance firm headquartered in New York -- in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, actually, which is where the show 30 Rock takes place. Which reminds me, I haven't seen a new episode of that for a while, I miss it. The firm itself does a lot of different things (I'm always learning a bit more of what we do), but I work in Equity Research, which is where the stock analysts are. Specifically I'm in the two person Physician Consultation Service (I work with Ilonna Rimm, an amazing person, youngest person ever to graduate from Harvard with an MD PhD). We assist the analysts and our clients by finding the best physicians in any field, and setting up consultations, or arranging conference calls with them so mutual fund, hedge fund, etc investors can harness their expertise.
Prior to that I was at MIT. In 2007 I graduated with a degree in econ, but since I decided at the last minute to add a math+CS degree, I finished that one in 2008. I lived in the East Campus dorm at MIT, and played lots of IM sports (soccer, football, softball, ultimate, dodgeball, badminton, ice hockey, unihoc, pistol, basketball, probably more that I'm not thinking of). Three summers I did something cool.
The summer of 2007 I worked at CSAIL on Exhibit and as one of a small team created Course Picker. Our team won a $10,000 Microsoft Research iCampus Technology Innovation Student Prize (or, I guess, MRiTIS prize..) thanks to one Mason Tang having the sagacity to apply for it. There's nothing quite like an email saying, "Hey guys, I submitted our project for this prize and we won, there's an awards ceremony on Friday where you can pick up your check.". (btw, you'll notice I follow the British convention of reasonable punctuation -- periods outside of quotation marks and so forth.)
Let's see, the summer before that, 2006, I spent in China. Most of my travels were detailed in a blog I kept, replicated here. It was through the MIT-CETI program. I and three others (Scot Frank, Piotr Mitros, and Stephanie Cavagnaro-Wong, for whom I can't find a web site), taught a computer science course at Zhejiang University and Dalian University. We spent 3 weeks at each school, and I was left with 6 weeks to travel. Piotr and I struck off together up to Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, out to Urumqi, Xinjiang Province (where all the riots are happening now), and back towards a sand dune desert town called Dunhuang. There we separated and I traveled on my own for some time.
That leaves one more interesting summer. I worked with Professor Jonathan Gruber and Professor Daniel Hungerman on a Blue Laws project. Blue Laws, aka Sunday Closing Laws, prohibit certain activities on Sundays. Gradually, these laws were repealed in many states, at different times. This yielded a wonderful little natural experiment to test how church attendance affected things like drug use, crime, charitable donations, and more. The eventual paper found that repealing blue laws led to lower church attendance. Lower church attendance led to more drinking and drug abuse, but only among those who formerly were churchgoers. My job here was to collect all the law data for each of the 50 states, so my days were spent at Harvard's Langdell law library, combing through current law books and the microfiche archive finding when each state repealed or amended a blue law. I had a partner, ostensibly, but she was kind of a flake. At least in the paper she was thanked, and I was "especially" thanked. :-)
And that's all I have time for now.