I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a township on the outskirts of Chicago, where I spent my formative years at a Spanish Immersion Elementary school. When I was younger, I spent most of my time outdoors. I loved camping, jumping on the trampoline, playing in the snow, and just generally participating in activities that would send my mother into conniptions after I tracked dirt in the house. Despite this, I was also happy to sit down and solve Rubik’s Cubes, fold origami, and read a good book.
After my parents had a messy divorce when I was in sixth grade, I lost my path a little bit. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, just that I wanted to distract myself from my reality. I fell into video games, TV, etc, and I was stress-eating and bed rotting to take my mind off of things. This continued until my junior year of high school, where my mom decided it was about time I “got a job”. I started working part-time at a local garden center, shoutout to West End Florist & Garden Center.
This job allowed me to reconnect with nature, and helped make up for the lost time I had spent rotting indoors. My experience there also led me to take an urban agriculture class senior year, where we tended community gardens on the ETHS campus. I really enjoyed the classwork learning about plant physiology, and I found it fun working in the community garden. It also just felt right, so I decided to major in Agricultural Business at LSU and get out of the cold.
My focus has mostly solidified since then. I’ve developed an interest in Urban Green Infrastructure, which is an umbrella term used for living walls, green roofs, city parks, hydroponic setups, aquaponics, urban beekeeping, anything that brings the positive externalities of biodiversity and green space into cities.
I decided to focus on this because people that live in urban environments oftentimes don’t get to see natural beauty in their daily lives, and if they don’t have the financial situation for a vacation they may never experience natural beauty. People can’t love and protect the world around them if they never experience it, and that’s important now more than ever as our natural world is imperiled. At the same time, too many people live in food deserts without access to fresh fruits and vegetables. These problems are, contrary to some people’s ill-informed opinions, solvable, and I genuinely believe we do have a responsibility to solve them.
I do a lot of extracurriculars and projects outside of my academics, which I’ve highlighted in other sections. However, this comes from the fact that I’m big on blending work and play. I’m of the opinion that the best work you can do is the work that you enjoy. This is why I like taking care of plants, and in my spare time I read, write, work out, and learn about new things. I enjoy the challenge of new things, and I enjoy building skills through things I enjoy. This website is an attempt to learn more about programming, and practice my writing skills, and have a digital portfolio, all while messing around and having fun with it.
To rein it back in, the future I see is one where people have access to fresh food anywhere, and natural beauty isn’t a luxury reserved for those who can escape to the suburbs or countryside. My goal is to find where the intersection between concrete jungles and actual jungles lies, and how that intersection can boost up our must vulnerable communities and populations.