“[As a child,] I was told, ‘Oh, you like STEM; you like art. You should be an architect.’ I’ve just ran with that ever since.

But then I realized the amount of workload in college for architects did not reflect the pay afterwards. Architects only get like six hours of sleep each night, and I don’t want to do that for the rest of my life. So I shifted my interests to more STEM-based architectural engineering with a higher paycheck. 

I think the engineering that goes behind bridges and super tall buildings is genuinely cool. I’m either going to split off into structural engineering or urban planning because Houston is very inefficient in how it’s built. I’m going to do a minor in sustainable energy in college, so I hope to limit a little bit of [the] overuse of materials and energy in the engineering and construction industry and make it more efficient, since there’s a lot of waste [produced] when building. There are lots of mistakes made, and infrastructure in the US is about to collapse because everything’s old. Growing up [in Houston] has influenced me to fix that.

Switching from architecture to architectural engineering [will also free] up more time to do the type of art that I want to do rather than just abstract sculptural stuff, which I’m not crazy about. 

I like urban settings [and] landscape [and] architecture photography.

My mom took photography in high school. She [did] it for both yearbook and the school newspaper. Since [she] still had a camera, she was like, ‘Oh, you should use this. Please get some use out of it.’ So I took [photography].

In my current photography classes [and] old art classes, I have a lot of fun drawing with my friends. Those have to be my best memories of high school.

One time my friend Nathan in AP Photography drew a very interesting picture of Nicki Minaj. And we named her Icky Collage and pasted her up on our wall and now [she’s] the class mascot.”