At the end of 7th grade, I ordered a steak that tasted dry and rubbery. I decided I wanted to be able to cook one myself, well enough to control every detail of it. My first attempt at fried rice used uncooked rice and came out as burnt vegetables and raw grains. I kept going anyway, and a few months later I was the one cooking dinner for my family on nights my mom didn't have time.

The instinct to challenge myself and my curiosity about the unknown have been driving my actions since that first fried rice. In middle school, a presentation on the stock market made me ask my dad what he'd invested in. He never had. He'd come to the U.S. with one goal and put everything into it, and it hadn't occurred to him to put money into anything else. The question lingered in my mind for weeks, until I couldn't bear it anymore and dove into the markets on my own. I started investing the little money I had from my first paycheck, earned working as a line cook. When I wanted to understand how a real business actually worked, I started one with my best friend in the back of our 10th grade English class. We figured the rest out along the way, answering ambiguous questions like who to market to and how to arbitrage an in-game currency into real-life returns.

That's the same reason I trained Wushu for over a decade, why I founded a trading club at OSU instead of joining one that already existed, and why I want to keep challenging myself in high finance. I'd rather do it wrong a hundred times than not try at all. The rubbery steak was a long time ago, but the question it left me with hasn't changed. If I don't understand how something works, I take it apart until I do.