More than any other academic discipline or interest, stories have always been an integral part of my life. Having been born and raised in Hawaii, I was more than just the only child for the first six formative years of my life—I was the only real child in my entire family, having no close siblings, cousins, or even neighborhood kids to play with. To entertain myself, I soon learned the value of books and movies, of comics and TV shows. In addition to allowing me to leave my small island home—even if only through imagination—stories of any form allowed me a small means to understand the complicated world of my adult relatives and gave me the skills to navigate a complicated world.
Throughout school, I found myself naturally gravitating towards narratives and the way people talk about themselves. Whether through novels or just high school drama, I was fascinated by the construction of meaning and desires, of mood and emotions. In reality, I came to realize the extent to which our lives, behavior, and personalities are governed by the stories we tell and form for our own selves. It was only natural, then, that I came to USC and became a double major in Psychology and Narrative Studies as a way to blend my interests together. While some might consider these two fields as disparate, I in fact see both as complimentary, as understanding people with all their complexities and idiosyncrasies is, in many ways, the same as understanding any good book, author, text, or film director.
My ability to take a broad set of classes allowed me the freedom and flexibility to blend different thoughts together. While I will soon attend a clinical psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, my background in English and the study of narrative forms has given me the conceptual framework to better tackle the way in which people communicate and understand themselves. The fortunate perk about being a writer or reader is that one never really has to ever stop or put it aside for the pursuit of other things—to write and to read is to be human, and to construct stories that guide us, motivate us, and entertain us runs deep in our blood.
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