Student at Western Washington University

I began at Western Washington University in fall 2024 intending to pursue a degree in economics or finance.

I had just left a full-time job at the T-Mobile call center in Bellingham and had a fairly straightforward plan: finish my bachelor's degree, then try to move into an administrative or analytical role at the company's corporate offices in Bellevue.

I abandoned that plan almost immediately.

For several years, I had been interested in systems and expertise: what it means to become genuinely good at something, to guide a system, to solve a particular class of problems, and to understand how those problems are actually solved.

That interest connected naturally to my earlier work in education, interface design, systems thinking, and behavior. I was increasingly interested in what people know, how knowledge is represented, and why possessing information is not the same thing as being able to use it successfully.

A linguistics course called Language and Brain opened a new way into those questions.

Language presented a biological representation problem. Somehow a physical system acquires, stores, transforms, and uses information well enough to produce an enormously complex behavior, one that appears in very few species yet is universal within ours.

Once I became curious about how the brain accomplished that, the questions expanded quickly.

Coursework in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience pushed me toward questions of information, consciousness, representation, mechanism, and computation. The deeper I went, the stranger the basic situation seemed: we use a brain to understand the world while still understanding remarkably little about how that brain produces understanding. That understanding is possible at all is miraculous.

I also came to appreciate that the technical conditions for studying the brain are changing quickly. Advances in neuroscience data infrastructure, computation, imaging, large-scale recording, and experimental methods are expanding what can be measured and modeled.

The next several decades will help determine which of those possibilities become durable scientific knowledge, which become useful technologies, and which turn out to have been misleading paths.

That makes this an unusually interesting century in which to be asking questions about the brain. I feel lucky to have stumbled into the field at such a time.

Student-at-Large, Sustainability, Equity, and Justice Fund Council

When I arrived at Western, I also wanted to find a way to continue participating in nonprofit, public-benefit, and stewardship work.

During the 2024–2025 and 2025–2026 academic years, I served as a Student-at-Large member of Western's Sustainability, Equity, and Justice Fund Council.

The council evaluates and funds projects proposed by students, faculty, and staff across sustainability, accessibility, equity, environmental justice, infrastructure, and student life.

I came to appreciate the program as a fairly direct implementation of something I had cared about since my earlier systems work: give people close to a problem meaningful resources and some authority to try solving it.

My role involved reviewing proposals, discussing feasibility and potential impact with the council, and participating in funding decisions for projects across campus.