I've always fancied myself as fairly strong writer. My high school junior year English teacher Mrs. Debenedetti nominated me for an Achievement Award in Writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, and my high school senior year English teacher Mr. Gavin once remarked to me while reading over my college personal statement that I wrote extremely well, especially for an Asian American. He suggested that, for me, writing may be a very mathematical process and that the elegance and beauty in my writing stems from an appreciation of the underlying structure of my words and sentences.
I enjoy writing and architecting papers and presentations. I feel that the craftwork involved in creating a piece of writing is sometimes painful but ultimately rewarding. Writings are meant to be read, so I share some of my works with you in this corner of my website.
Back in high school, I always wanted to enter a writing contest and to win a prize. I felt envious of those students who had their award-winning essays posted online and at exhibits and wondered why I hadn't written something brilliant about growing up as an Asian American or about Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy.
Bored during the summer before my freshman year of college, I decided to put my writing skills to good use and to take a shot at a writing award. Having attended Catholic schools for thirteen years (K-12) at Saint Brigid School and Saint Ignatius College Preparatory, I was sick of Catholic dogma and the contradictions that priests and nuns endeavored to inculcate as part of my religious education. I am neither Catholic nor Christian, but I attended Catholic schools because they offered one of the strongest academic programs in San Francisco. I therefore settled on a summer essay contest sponsored by the Freedom from Religion Foundation on the topic "America was not founded a Christian nation."
My essay entry racked up a 3rd place prize and was published in the organization's monthly newspaper.
This publication in the literary magazine of Saint Ignatius College Preparatory was inspired by conversations with my mother regarding her immigrant experience. My mother didn't have the opportunity to attend college because college was a privilege controlled by a corrupt Communist government. I am fortunate to live in an America where my freedoms to learn, study, and grow are not as constrained as they were for my mother back in China. I owe everything I have to her.
This paper presents the design of a read-optimized, column-oriented, and distributed data warehouse architecture for supporting ad-hoc queries on terabytes of data. Our initial experiments show that are architecture can achieve 100 times faster performance than a commercial row-store database and 10 times faster performance than a commercial column-store. The key contributions of the design include:
My specific contributions to this project have centered around: