Q: Where did you grow up? What was your path to Cal? A: I was born in the Philippines, where I also spent the first two years of my life. Then, I moved to Oman, a Middle Eastern country, where my father works as a pharmacist. I spent most of my life thus far in a small semi-urban city called Al Wadi Al Kabir (literally, "The Great Valley", where the city is located), and I go back home every vacation. I am half-Indian (from my father's side) and half-Filipino (from my mother's side), and so it is very hard to place myself in a particular cultural bracket. Even though I am a Filipino citizen, my exposure to the culture is limited to television shows and food, and I can understand some Tagalog, but not speak it. I studied from Grades 1 through 12 at an Indian School in Al Wadi Al Kabir, and so I grew up in a predominantly Indian culture, enjoy Indian food, and occasionally listen to Hindi songs, watch Bollywood movies, and -- more recently -- dance to Bollywood songs at the RSF. After high school, I took a gap year to decide where I wanted to go and pursue my education, and in that year, I applied to US colleges, coached the SAT while I was studying for it, interned at a newsmagazine, and earned my first paychecks. I applied to Cal on the suggestion of a fantastic college counsellor, and now here I am! :) I completed my B.S. degree in EECS here (with a minor in Math) in 2010. I am currently a PhD student here at Cal, but am planning to temporarily leave with an M.S. degree, also in EECS, by the end of this summer, to take a breather and work: I will start work at Yelp in the fall. In case you're wondering if EECS is for you: I wasn't sure either! I had always thought that I should stay away from CS, because I had the unfortunate impression that CS people spend their time secluded in a cubicle. I was so mistaken: CS is one of the most social majors I know. I came in thinking I would be either a bio-engineer or a chemical engineer, and I took both Chemistry 4A (the first course for chemical engineers) and Computer Science 61A my first semester. I didn't do as well in the former, because I spent too much time enjoying the latter. CS61A also gave me the impetus to be a TA in EECS, and I have been a TA eight times since (for CS3, CS10, CS61A, CS61BL and EE20N). Moral of the story: if you think you may like EECS -- if you have even an inkling -- give it a shot! Q: How much programming have you done (and what languages)? A: I had done a fair bit of programming in school: computer science classes back home dealt mainly with how to use Microsoft products. However, we also dabbled in BASIC, Logo (which, I would later find out, was invented here at Berkeley by Brian Harvey, a former -- and awesome -- instructor of this course), and C++. At Berkeley, of course, I did a lot of programming, and my resume proclaims that I have coded in Scheme, Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Scratch, BYOB, F#, LaTeX, MIPS, Verilog, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Yep, alphabet soup. A close friend of mine remarked that CS isn't really about the languages, it's about the concepts. He suggested that if you didn't know a language, but a job recommends that you know it, you can always say you do, and then spend the weekend before the job interview learning the language. While I don't necessarily endorse this, but I endorse the idea behind it: once you see the fundamental CS concepts, which you will in the CS61 series, languages become easier to pick up, so CS should never be about the languages. Corollary: don't let your lack of knowledge of a language daunt you: just jump in and try more of it out. This is one of the few fields that you can actually do that. Q: What are your hobbies? What are some of your talents and skills? A: I will answer these two questions together, because they seem to be related. I am a competitive Scrabbler, and so I enjoy the occasional game of Scrabble. (It's not much nerdier than chess, and competitive Scrabble is more about your strategies than about the words you make.) I also code small personal projects on the side, but I have begun to find lesser and lesser time for them. :( I can do reasonably large arithmetic in my head, the fruit of having to do so for years in school. I enjoy science fiction: in particular, I have taken a liking to "The X-Files" and "Doctor Who", and their spinoffs. I also enjoy popular drama shows and sitcoms: I recently caught up with "How I Met Your Mother" and "Modern Family". I also love to teach and explain, and I like to think that I am witty and punny, but your mileage of this may vary. :) I also absorb Internet memes, and spend a *lot* of time browsing the Intarwebz. (Though I reckon that this isn't an amazing fact nowadays.) I have not fed my non-nerdy side much, especially before college, although I am actively trying to change that. I try to lift at least twice a week, I enjoy the occasional game of basketball, and I started to pursue martial arts when I came to America: I am currently a blue-red belt in Tae Kwon Do, and a yellow belt in Judo. Q: Have you done anything remarkable? Has anything memorable happened to you? A: I am slowly coming to believe that I am an anonymous Internet celebrity, which is both thrilling and intimidating. I interned at Gmail in the Summer of 2008, and I was tasked with writing up experimental features under the Gmail Labs initiative -- basically, we pushed out features that users could try and give feedback on, and if the feedback was generally good, the feature would be permanently incorporated into Gmail. This is my "remarkable achievement", because code that I wrote one summer is now being used by millions of people over the world, and that's exciting. It is also a testament to how powerful and ubiquitous Computer Science is. My main features were: * The Default Text Styler, which allows you to set the style (font face, font color, and so on) of an e-mail as soon as you begin to compose one. * The Message Previewer, which pops up a little pane when you right-click a message, allowing you to preview the contents. * The Forgotten Attachment Detector -- my pride and joy. The idea was not mine, and it was already implemented internally; my task was to re-implement it publicly. Basically, the Detector determines if you were going to attach a file to an e-mail but didn't do so; it scans through the text of your e-mail, looks for variations of the phrase "I am attaching", and checks that you have actually attached something. If you haven't attached anything, it will pop up an alert before you send the e-mail, thus saving you from the embarrassment of sending an e-mail without the necessary attachments. This is, apparently, the most useful of my labs, and was soon upgraded to become a permanent feature of Gmail. The considerable online attention to the Detector consistently amazes me. Friends often tell me how the feature saved them, and the Detector is seen occasionally on Reddit. The Internet is an amazing place. Of course, an even more memorable incident is when I first heard I was coming to Berkeley: that was the best day of my pre-college life, and quite possibly, the most life-changing, thank God. Q: What commitments will be consuming your cycles this summer? A: This summer, my time will be split between co-instructing CS61Awesome to a new generation of computer scientists (I sound so old and corny), and conducting research in program analysis and synthetic biology with Prof. Sanjit Seshia, as part of finishing my Masters thesis.