Hello there!

I'm a freshman at Bowdoin College and a recent transplant to the cold country of Maine, though I've spent my entire life prior in Phoenix, Arizona.

I travel on the cheap, trying to find the best deals to travel to new places and experience new things on pretty much the tightest budget possible. I'm very easy to please and hard to irritate, but typical tourists can get on my nerves sometimes when they lose sight of the moment and take selfies the entire time in front of all sorts of incredible things that they'll only remember through their cameras and not their own memories. I try to make a constant effort to live in the present, take in my surroundings, and see the world from different perspectives.

Looking back, I realize I basically told my life motto to my classmates in my high school grad speech: "There are two very important things in life: experience, and people. Experience gives us excitement.. People give that excitement meaning." To live and be alive in new experiences with people that matter to me, whether a good friend or a kind, random soul from a foreign land, and to bring only goodness to the world--these are the things that matter to me.

I love meeting new people & hearing your recommendations for great places to go, books to read, and talks to watch and listen to.

Interests

• writing
• graphic design
• reading
• podcasts
• hiking
• backpacking
• environmental studies
• sociology
• learning new things
• making friends
• tedx
• ted talks
• long distance hiking

Music, Movies, and Books

The Lumineers are unarguably the greatest band ever. This is completely objective.

I LOVE podcasts, books, and TED Talks. I'm curator for TEDxBowdoinCollege, which means my job is to find super cool people to speak and help them craft an incredible talk for our yearly TEDx event.

Though I have limited time during the school year, I thoroughly enjoy and find great value in books. I'm more into nonfiction, but I'm not sure I can pick a favorite.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I have type 1 diabetes, and when I was 15, my brother and I backpacked the 221-mile John Muir Trail in California's Sierra Nevadas to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). On the last day, hiking to the top of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental U.S., a freak snowstorm (at the beginning of August) forced us to turn around in our mere shorts and light rain jackets.

That fall I gave a speech about this failure to summit that would raise $270,000 for JDRF.

Two summers later, Ethan and I went back on my ten year anniversary of living with type one diabetes and finally summitted Mount Whitney.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States