I like making new things. I like doing things people haven't tried before, walking places people haven't walked before. This seems very difficult to achieve at first glance, given the thousands of years of people who claimed all the firsts before me. On second glance, however, looking from the top of my dorm's dryer from which I am writing this, I can see the endless loads of work, effort, and time that people have put into creating our built world. We often talk about people like Steve Jobs and his team at Apple as THE inventors, but we don't consider the people at Miele who created the washing machine Steve used. We don't often think about Shuji Nakamura and his dedication to creating the blue LED. We overlook the countless laborers, designers, architects, and teachers who made these achievements possible. Put into this perspective, it's easier than ever to do something for the first time. Yet the world doesn't gasp when I bend a dining hall fork at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, August 27, at Place Vanier for the first time; they gasp when their clothes come out perfectly washed. That's the kind of first I want to pursue. To make a washing machine, an iPhone, or a blue LED — perched not only on the shoulders of giants, but on their dryers too.















###### Old About me: ######

Hello, I am Christopher Lam. I have a hard time summarizing myself. The MBTI test says I'm ENTJ. Snapchat says I'm a Sagittarius. I say I'm Christopher Lam. I enjoy hiking, reading, and the feeling when something you made works out just as you expected. That would mean CS would be a dopamine-filled fest, but I always get IBM errs.

I also like the feeling of being in a room (preferably at night) with a group of people and a problem. It's like the scene in the one scene in the 1995 docudrama Apollo 13. You know, the one where a group of men in white t-shirts, black ties, pocket protectors, and browlines stood there looking at things before someone said "we got to fit this into the hole for this with nothing but that," and they all went to work. Besides the vague dialogue, it was a pretty cool scene.

If someone asks me, my interests are mainly engineering, design, hiking, reading, and writing.

Here is some of my favorite works:

### AV Nonfiction:

- Real Engineering (YouTube)
- Crash Course (YouTube)
- TED
- TED-Ed
- NPR

### Texts:

- True Tales of American Life - Paul Aster
- Human Acts - Han Kang
- Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre
- What Made Apollo a Success?
- A New Program for Graphic Design - David Reinfurt
- Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power - Byung Chul-Han
- Existentialism is Humanism - Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays - Albert Camus
- High Flight - John Gillespie Magee Jr.
- 1961 BART Engineering Report

### Movies:

- Ikiru - Akira Kurosawa
- Drive My Car - Ryusuke Hamaguchi
- Black Panthers - Agnès Varda
- The Battle of Algiers - Gillo Pontecorvo

### Art:

- Lot 20 Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs - Danh Vo
- The Visitors - Ragnar Kjartansson

### Music

https://open.spotify.com/user/gn2jgkvepnxoosoobhvnbt16z?si=6fd42ea2931243d8