The more I think about it, the more I’m always grateful that things worked out for me post-PhD exactly as I had hoped – a job I love in a city I love where I can apply the skills I spent years building to investigate questions I find interesting. All the romantics of it aside, […]

Welcome to Part 2 of my Eurotrip postmortem! In this post, I’ll be providing “reviews” of the various cities I visited. To keep things simple, I break my thoughts about each city down into 1) level of attachment, 2) pros, 3) cons, 4) recommendations, and 5) other comments, if available. I’ve also labeled each city […]

With my 42 days in Europe this August to October drawing to a close, I’ve decided to write a series of postmortems on the trip. It’s been a long trip and, as such, there’s a lot to write about. I’m breaking down my writings about the trip into three chunks: 1) Travel tips: The most […]

My trip to Paris was a moderately big deal for me as it was my first solo trip to a place where I don’t speak the language, and despite significant travels in Asia and the United States, I was also the first in my immediate family to set foot in Europe. And as I’ve been […]

EDIT 09/18/2019: Edited for AmEx Gold. EDIT 11/12/2017: Edited for Uber Card. So I’ve become more than a bit of a credit nerd over the past few years. It’s to save myself money and not for any noble purpose, except maybe the bit where you feel a cathartic release for sticking it to The Banker Man […]

This post was initially planned to be published last summer, after my first ASIMS, but with my second ASIMS rapidly approaching, I wanted to take a moment to finish writing it and put it up. Late May last year (2016), I had the great fortune to be able to return to my alma mater for […]

I’ve had multiple occasions in my PhD program where I feel bad about not having some noble moral ambition for wanting to do what I do. I know people who are here because they want to investigate how to get people to be healthier, protect journalists, investigate how power and media shape societal beliefs, and […]

A week after I graduated from USC, I was set to visit my then-girlfriend up in Santa Cruz. The first leg of this trip entailed a long train journey up the coast to San Jose. I went prepared for this lengthy trek with a new album from Christopher Tin, one of my favorite composers of […]

The entirety of your time at USC, the concept of the Trojan Family is drilled into you like you’re being inducted into a cult. How the Trojan Family is all this and all that, how the Trojan Family has done this and that, how the Trojan Family will mean blah and blah, et cetera. On one […]