I took a bunch of programming classes in high school, but when I got to Brown, I decided to avoid computer science. I had liked learning about algorithms, the fastest ways to solve problems, how computers worked, but I hadn’t always liked the personality of my fellow students. Basically, a lot of them were big nerds, and I could never get behind their enthusiasm for mastering Linux commands.

As a freshman at Brown, I took a logic class where I learned that certain easy to state problems are uncomputable, meaning no systematic set of instructions can be used to solve them. More importantly, I learned that many people study the science of computation without actually writing programmings. The next year I decided to give computer science another shot, and one of my TAs (my buddy Kevin) invited me to join his group independent study project on computational complexity. After that, I was sold.