What surprising job have you had in the past?

For two days during fall quarter of my second year, I was randomly cast as a featured extra in a movie being filmed in a soundstage on Chicago’s West Side. My line required that I scream in Rachel Weisz’s face during a rowdy bar scene. The film was Fred Claus, and it currently has a 21 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

What would you want to be doing if not your current profession?

I believe that personal storytelling is a universal human superpower. To build a career around finding and elevating peoples’ stories would give me so much energy.

What was the last book you finished?

Erasure by Percival Everett.

What was the last book you recommended to a friend?

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.

What UChicago course left the biggest impression on you?

So hard to pick just one—Virginia Woolf or Ulysses with Lisa Ruddick; Poetry and Politics with Liesl Olson; Walden with Eric Slauter (which met in Special Collections of the Reg); Bert Cohler’s (LAB’57, AB’61) Self, Culture, and Society Core sequence? Perhaps the one that stands out for the broader impact on my academic (and, I would argue, professional) career is when I dropped Econ 101 for Beginning Poetry Workshop with Suzanne Buffam. Creative writing became a central part of my Chicago experience, and the skills I gained around the workshop table I use on a daily basis as a leader at Google.

What book changed your life?

When I read The Wild Iris by Louise Glück as a junior in high school, I realized that poetry would always be important to me.

Tell us the best piece of advice you’ve received.

In the aftermath of a broken heart, my mother reminded me that the center of my happiness cannot exist anywhere outside of myself. It cannot be dependent on someone or something else. It has to come from within.

What advice would you give to a brand-new Maroon?

Take four classes every quarter. Don’t miss the opportunity to attend professors’ office hours. Enroll in at least one creative writing workshop.

What did you learn at UChicago that still benefits you today?

How to think critically and how to argue productively.

What’s your most vivid UChicago memory?

My experience at UChicago and in Hyde Park was and continues to be so full of luminous details that it’s hard to pick just one, but certainly a memory that rises to the top is the moment I met my wife (Lilly Connett, AB’07, MBA’14) at a party on 57th and Kimbark when she punched me in the face.