It's not very hard to talk about oneself, if the peson knows him or herself well, but it is hard to say things that others would like to know, as different people inquire about various things.

I was born on 28th of September in 1978, which means that every year I'm a year older :P All my life I've been moving from one country to another, and for that reason I do not claim any one of them as my home country. I'm a citizen of the world, as someone has rightiously called me once. The flip side of that, is that no country can claim me either. I'm like a leaf tossed by the wind, or a ship on a rough sea. You never know where I'll be in a few months.

As far as personality goes, I'm a very unique person. The major part of that plays my upbringing, which was done by my grandparents and the nuns from the Catholic school which I attended as a child. (Since they're the ones that had the greatest influence on me, I consider them as the more important ones to point out. By the same line of thought, the other ones aren't worth mentioning…)

Here is what I look like.

I'm very easily to get along with, provided that the people I'm interacting with are being nice back to me. I do not tolerate rudeness of any kind, and I do tend to tell people straight out what I think or feel. (Saves them the trouble of wondering and assuming things, which may be miles off…)
I can be incredibly playful at times, and at another I can be incredibly serious. It all depends on the situation, people involved, and the mood I'm in. Most of the time, I'm all smiles, laugh and giggles, even thought sometimes I can be very shy.

I have very inquiring mind. I always want to know everything about everything, which constitutes to me having very broad interests. My love for learning tends to give me a label of a nerd, but my interests aren't strictly narrowed to the school subjects (althought I love them all with the exception of chemistry). I love to travel, play volleyball (which keeps me nicely fit), draw and paint, write short stories, read books, and ride horses. If you catch me in a good mood, you might see me help my daddy fix his car, or fix computers. By no means am I an expert on either one, though.

As far as school is concerned, I will be attending the University of London beginning in the autumn of 1998. I'll be at Birkbeck College preparing for getting my degree in Criminal Justice. I'd like to go into forensics, or international law, but I haven't definitely decided on either one.

Why international law? you may ask. I suppose one of the major reasons for going into international law is the fact that having to move around so much, and traveling to so many countries, I've learned quite a few languages. Having a job that would be able to put them to use would help me to stay fluelent in them, as I'm beginning to forget things that I've picked up so easily as a child. I do mind the politics side, and the business one tho' :/

Why forensics? Well, for one thing, my dad is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches biochemistry and biophysics, but he also does a lot of research. Since I was a little child, I've been in and out of all kinds of labs, and tried out everything I could basically get my hands on.
Since my dad works very hard, I do not get to see him most of the time, as he tends to come home when I'm already asleep at night, and I leave before he wakes up in the morning. I figured that one of the ways to spend more time with him, would be to join him in his work. And that's what I did.

Science is not easy, and it's not something you can understand overnight. It took me months of sitting and reading protocols, as well as attending countless seminars, to begin to get a feel for what I was participating in. (Believe it or not, for a 13/14 year old - that is when I decided to get serious about things - it was quite overwhelming at the beginning. Most of the things would just go *wooosh* over my head. Especially the lab slang :/) Month after month, week after week and day by day, things began to sink in and I could actually actively participate in the research. My dad is working on many interesting things, and he's just incredible fountain of information. I don't think there's an area of interest that he wouldn't know at least 80% about. Computers, school subjects, cars, politics, religion, you name it - he knows it.

I've always loved nature, but it was a long time till I've met someone who sparkled a serious interest in Biology within me. The turn-about point came at the end of the 11'th class, when I found out that I'd not be able to take an Advanced Placement Biology class during my 'senior year' at the high school that I was attending. (Sorry to say so, but when comparing 'mericun schools to european ones, the 'mericun schools suck beyond your wildest imagination…) Not willing to give up on the information that I'd gain from the subject, I decided to take the class during the summer school at the University of Pennsylvania. The TA who was lecturing during that summer session, was one of the most intelligent, nice and patient people I've ever met in my life. His name is Raymond Winters, but like me, he despises his first name and goes by the middle one, Scott.

Scott taught me a lot about biology on the micro-level. Untill I've met him, I didn't realise how much I didn't know. He also directed my interest into plants, and as I love nature I did not object to it at all. Unfortunatelly, as everything good, the summer session ended, and I had to move onto other things. (I recall that the summer was very tough for me for another reason, as that was when one of my friends, Michal, drowned down at Florida, and if it wasn't for Scott and my best friend Tuyet, I do not have a clue how I'd have gotten through it.)

As the time moved on, I've left few things behind me, but the interest in plants was not one of them. During my 12th class, Nick Fisher supported my iterests with his famous thesis, and even more so, his plastocyanin. That is also when he lost his bet against me, thinking that I'd not be able to name the squence that he sent me, nor find the mutation in it. The problem was solved within a minute grin. All I had to do, was to sent the squence to the NIH, and it would do the data search for me. Asking the computer to compare the sequence to the normal one (even tho the one that Nick sent me was in reverse) wasn't hard either. That should teach him not to underestimate my abilities, eh? *giggle*

During my freshman year at the university, I continued my interest in plant bio by working at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, in the Biology department for Dr. Joe Ecker. Perhaps if it wasn't for the workmates fighting over whose work I should do, I would still be working there. Unfortuatelly running the whole lab and doing their experiments for them, while they sat and wrote out their grants, wasn't my idea of having fun. After working there for 6 months, I said "thank you very much", and quit, giving up on the nice title of a "Molecular Biologist's Assistant". That is also where my interest in plants ended.

As time passed by, with all the courses that I was taking and seminars that I was attending, I've begun to get deeper into law and it's magic. My course major is criminal justice, and although it's not quite the area of law where I want to be involved, I did get a feel for what's it like to be a lawyer. I've attended real life trials at the City Hall in Philadelphia, and when I thought that I've got enough of what it takes to be a lawyer, I signed up and took part in a mock trial, where I played the role of the only plaintiff against 3 defense lawyers.
The case involved a teenage mother from the state of NJ, who gave birth to a full term baby-boy during her senior prom dance in the ladie's-room, suffocated the baby, left it between the plastic bags in the rubbishbin, and went back on the dance-floor to enjoy the night. As a person, I was very sickened with the behaviour of the 19 yo young lady, and of course I demanded that she should be tried on the basis of the first degree murder. Unfortunatelly the judges were stupid enough not to know the terminology, and I had to explain to them that "first degree murder" means murder with premeditation.
Michelle had 9 months to think through and carefully plan out what she wanted to do with the baby after its birth. If she didn't want to keep it, she might as well have had it put for adoption. The judges thought that I was being too seviere, and I lost the case. Had I asked for the second degree murder, I'd have won easily, but that would be going against my principles. Michelle was lucky enough that even if she did get charged with the first degree murder, the highest form of punishement would be life in prison, as the state of NJ doesn't have capital punishement. She was guilty, and everyone knew it, so the key was to get her off with as light of a sentence as possible.

This trial also clued me in that this may not be exactly what I'd like to do for living, and that is why I decided to combine my interest in law with the years of experience in medicine and go into forensics. Currently (summer of 1998) I'm working at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in a cytogenetics lab for Dr. Jaclyn Biegel, in the Human Genetics department.

If you'd like to know what exactly we work at in our lab, here's few links that you might find very interesting.

I have spent my sophomore year at uni at Birkbeck College, Uni of London, in London UK (no, not London, Canada). If you'd like to see the photographs I took and read a few bits and pieces about that year of my life, click here.

1999 update: right now I'm working in a Dilworth Paxon LLP law firm in Philadelphia, PA, where I'm getting experience in the field which is related to my course major. So far I'm enjoying it, people are nice and the pay's good, but we'll see just how much stress I *can* handle :)

2000 update: currently I'm studying Forensic Psychobiology at University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland. (In retrospect now, it was a brilliant year. To find out a bit more about Dundee, my flatmates and whatever else happened while I was living in Scotland click here.

2000/2001 update: I'm back at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, to graduate with a Criminal Justice Degree. I can't wait to have all this behind me already! :)

Who you are, is also shaped by your friends. In my case all the glory goes to my best friend Tuyet. She's the only best friend that I have, and I can easily say so, because in my life many people simply came and went, and throughout the years, she was the only one that remained constant. We've seen each other through thick and thin, and aside for my dad and my grandparents, she's the only other person that I'd be willing to give up my life for.