I don't see a meaningful distinction between art and engineering. Both are exercises in reducing chaos into something coherent — one through systems and constraints, the other through vision and intuition. The tools look different but the underlying problem is the same: you start with nothing, you impose order, and if you're lucky what comes out on the other end means something to someone.
I grew up moving between both worlds without ever feeling like I fully belonged to either. The engineers thought I was too interested in aesthetics. The artists thought I was too obsessed with how things worked. I stopped trying to reconcile that contradiction a long time ago and started treating it as the point.
The people who shaped the last decade were specialists. The people who will shape the next one won't be. The problems worth solving have gotten too complex and too human for any single discipline to hold them. What they'll require is people who can write code and think in metaphors, who can build systems and still ask whether the system should exist in the first place.
That's the direction I'm moving. Not toward one side or the other, but further into the overlap — where the technical and the expressive stop being separate languages and start becoming the same one.
Experience
I grew up competing. For years I trained with the Daegu Public Facilities Corporation professional shooting team, eventually earning a place on the Korea Armed Forces Athletic Corps shooting team and representing Korea on the national team at the Asian Shooting Championships and numerous junior competitions. Shooting is a sport that looks still from the outside — you're standing, barely moving, pulling a trigger. What people don't see is the mental architecture underneath it. Every competition is an exercise in controlling the one thing you can actually control: yourself. Your breathing, your grip, the half-second between thought and action. That kind of discipline doesn't stay on the range. It follows you into everything else.
The transition from athlete to professional started earlier than most. I became the youngest intern ever at KPMG Korea — and the first to do so before attending college. Walking into a Big Four firm as a teenager, surrounded by people a decade older with credentials I hadn't earned yet, taught me how to move in rooms where I didn't obviously belong. You learn quickly that competence earns trust faster than a title does.
I'm now at Vanderbilt University double-majoring in Computer Science and Human Organizational Development, which is exactly as unusual a combination as it sounds and exactly as intentional. CS gives me the tools to build things. HOD gives me the framework to ask whether they're worth building and why they look the way they do. I'm part of Kappa Sigma, Delta Sigma Pi, and 180 Degrees Consulting — organizations that have pushed me to lead, collaborate, and think about problems that don't have clean answers.
This summer I'm a fellow at Simpli Inc., working on a platform that redirects surplus corporate inventory to nonprofits across the country. In a few months I've helped onboard hundreds of nonprofit partners, built internal outreach tools from scratch, and seen firsthand what it looks like when logistics and mission actually align. It's the kind of work that makes the overlap between engineering and impact feel less abstract.
