Most unforgetble journeys

fall of 2017 - May 2019

• The Glass Bead Game [Hermann Hesse]

• 🤯️
  Invisible Cities [Italo Calvino]

• 🤯️
  Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion [Dacher Keltner,                 Jonathan Haidt]

• 🤯️
  The Lathe of Heaven [Ursula le Guin] 
  to think you know the key to positive social change is a disastrous ignorance

• The Third Door [Alex Banayan]

• 🤯️
  How to Change Your Mind [Michael Pollan]

• meaningness.com

• The Power of Cute [Simon May]

• 🤯️
  Myth of the Eternal Return [Mircea Eliade]
  

• 🤯️ MIT Mystery Hunt

• workshop with Viet Thanh Nguyen
  read massive, find the tropes & avoid them.


• Harvard Global Development Conference + meeting Tony Wagner

• 🤯️
  Wake Up Earth Retreat at Plum Village
  breathe. it’s a great thing to have personal problems to work on, as i will learn to grow into a better person.

• 🤯️
  “Freeing Architecture” by Junya Ishigami
  architecture doesn’t have to follow or rebel against traditions.

• Venice Architecture Biennale

• NY Art Book Fair

• talk by Keith Sawyer
  lucky people are creative; all creative processes follow a zig-zag path.

• International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

• 🤯️
  meeting amazing, amazing people at Envision

• A Night of Philosophy and Ideas

• 🤯️
  talk by Paul Steinhardt on his adventure of finding quasicrystals 
  no rejections should stop your curiosity.

• talk by Merritt Moore
  perfect means sameness; sameness means being replaceable

• talking to people at Wisdom 2.0

• Design Nation Conference
  
  
  

• 🤯️ 
  Intercollegiate Psychedelics Summit at UPenn, especially meeting David Yaden, who does research on all kinds of spiritual experiences and awe -- what I have long been interested in.
  
  
  

• 🤯️
  talk by Ge Wang on Artful Design


• WSJ The Future of EVerything Festival: + talks by visionaries and creators Dustin Yellin, David Rockwell, and Bjarke Ingels + meeting Andrew Yang who added “non sibi” (”not for oneself,” the motto of our high school) to his signature on my book
  
  
  
• Design Diplomacy Finland: talking to artist Matthew Day Jackson and architect Alex Mustonen, co-founder of Snarkitecture
  

• building a pop-up arch consisting of dozens of cardboard boxes in my high school’s assembly building

• week-long trip to DC & Gettysburg + researching soldiers died at Gettysburg [+]
  even primary sources can be brutally wrong; history is an inevitable fiction striving to near the asymptote of reality.

• studying Interior Architecture at Parsons Open Campus
  
  
• 5 days hiking & camping in the Appalachian Trail with 9 other students
  
  
• Live Meditation with Bob McFerrin & Gimme5

• talking to Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Frances Arnold
  people should try everything they want to do, so that they live in a big world and keep themselves fearless, not afraid of being different.

• ❤️
  solo ice skating @ Bryant Park

• volunteering at Boston ILLUMINUS

• interviewing/auditioning for a Chinese reality show
  
  
  (post audition dinner!)

• ❤️
  putting ~70 Santa hats onto sculptures, lamps, & trees of Princeton with my friends, dancing to Christmas Trap music
  
  
  
         
• sledding on the ice of Summer Palace on the first day of 2019 with my family

• ❤️
  watching my friend’s friend gather all the necessary ingredients (including 12 apples) from dining hall to make apple pies and whipped cream. He was just visiting my friend for two days

• having an indoor picnic with my friends in the room with most beautiful view on cmapus, on the day before all final papers were due

• two courses in particular: History of Contemporary Science by Michael Gordin and Introduction to Architectural Design by Paul Lewis and Annie Barrett -- they both changed the way I view the world