About Myself...

• Background
• Studies
• Hobbies

I was born in Australia in 1983 in a north-eastern town called Proserpine, Being a small town whose main business is sugar cane.

At the age of 2 I moved to Brisbane and there spent 17 years studying through school. During grade 5 my family moved house from the suburbs to rural-suburbia, where we now own 1.5 acres of land and enjoy the convenience as well as the serenity.

The picture on the right is a scanned picture of my family standing in our backyard. The picture includes my mother and father, my younger brother and younger sister.

After graduating from high school, I continued into university, and am now a student at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

My current studies consist of two fields, divided into two different Bachelor degrees, which I am studying simultaneously. My first and main degree is a Bachelor of Information Technology, in which my main field is software engineering and information systems. In the year 2002, I entered my second year.

My second degree is a Bachelor of Arts, double majoring in the Japanese language and culture. Currently I am also in my second year of this degree.

At Queensland University I have the opportunity to study these two degrees at the same time in a 5 year program. Presently, I am doing an exchange program in Japan for one year and upon my return will complete the requirements of my arts degree, allowing me to focus more on my software engineering.

For the last nine years I have pursued to hobbies to any substantial extent. Firstly is piano, in particular, classical. I started this at the age of 10 and continued until now. I have successfully completed to 7th Grade in the Australian Academy of Music and Drama, which is approximately equivalent to the more popular AMEB 8th Grade in Australia. I enjoy playing solely for personal leisure, and do not make efforts to perform publicly. The composers whose pieces I enjoy most at the moment are Beethoven, for its liveliness and technical dexterity, and Rachmaninoff for its profound sounds and movements. Mozart is also a joy to play because of the beauty of the pieces themselves, along with some Debussy for a contrast of something slower and with a softer feeling, although very rarely to I do the music any justice!

My second main pastime is that of martial arts, in particular Karate. I have attained the level of Black Belt in a school called Goju Kai Karate-do, a Japanese school originally from the Okiniwan islands, and before that from China. I began karate at the same time as piano, when I was 10 years old, and also continued throughout school until now. Eventually it complemented my studies of Japanese in both language usage and cultural studies, the latter being more profound.

Aside from these, I enjoy most things including travelling, of which I have had 3 overseas trips, outdoors activities (I was given a Sky Diving trip for my 18th birthday!) and generally socialising.