I'd like to take a moment to thank three people who have had the greatest positive influence on my life.

Jay Fillmore
Patrick Ledden
Anthony Phillips

All my successes are a reflection of them, all my failures are of my own making.

A little about where I attended...

Grossmont High School
I had always loved physics and was quite excited to be going to high school where I would be able to take physics courses. My first opportunity was in a science course for incoming freshmen taught by Thomas Eklund. The course covered physics in one semester and chemistry in the other. In an effort to get to the school's main physics quicker, I took both biology and chemistry my sophomore year. I don't recall the biology course all that well, but I enjoyed the chemistry course taught by Susan Emerson.

Coronado High School
After my sophomore year my family moved to Coronado. When I started looking at the course offerings I found that Coronado offered far more in the way of physics courses than Grossmont had. I enrolled in AP Physics B my junior year which was taught by Bill Seager. As I wanted to take AP Physics C my senior year, I found I needed to move along a little quicker in the area of mathematics than I had been (I had taken only Algebra and Geometry at Grossmont), so I moved up to Pre-Calculus my junior year which was taught by Ben Cooper. My senior year I took AP Physics C (with Bill Seager) and AP Calculus AB (with Ben Cooper) and was also a TA for the standard Physics course (also taught by Bill Seager) that year.

Grossmont College and Cuyamaca College
I was rather burnt out on school when I graduated from Coronado, so I took a couple years off before starting up again. I enrolled at Grossmont College which had a transfer agreement with UCSD. I only needed to complete a list of courses and would enter UCSD as a junior to begin upper division work on my major (at that point I was declaring my major as physics). Because of the time off I opted not to use any of my AP credits and took all the standard courses... most of which I took at Grossmont, but two of them (the differential equations and modern physics courses) I took at Cuyamaca College.

John Muir College and UCSD Extension
I had finished up the math and physics courses at Grossmont/Cuyamaca pretty quickly, though the other courses were proving more troublesome. I had ask one of my physics teachers about general relativity and he told me that I needed more math before I could really study that subject. I found out that the math I needed was differential geometry and went to UCSD to audit their first course on the subject which was taught by Jay Fillmore. He informed me that I could take the course for credit by registering via UCSD Extension.

Over the next year I completed the Math 150 series, took Math 151 and completed the Math 250 series (the graduate level differential geometry series) via UCSD Extension. I was having issues completing the language requirement for transferring from Grossmont, and that was when Jay Fillmore and Patrick Ledden (provost of John Muir College) petitioned to get me admitted to UCSD. Shortly after that I changed majors from physics to mathematics.

Geometry Center
While taking a topology course at UCSD, my professor (Peter Doyle) suggested that I apply for a summer position at the National Science Foundation's Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota. I was fortunate enough to be one of the 20 students (out of more than 250 applicants) to be accepted. I was also fortunate enough to have the director of the Geometry Center's Summer Institute, Tony Phillips, work with me on my project studying tight immersions of surfaces.