User:Victor612612/sandbox

Victor Shan He Lam (born December, 1999) is a student currently matriculated at Hofstra University. Lam is currently a Freshman student enrolled at Hofstra University, with a major in biology and a concentration in pre-medical studies. He hopes to attend medical school and pursue a career in medicine.

Childhood, family, and education
His father, Leung K Lam, is a chef, and his mother, Jamie S Lam, is an accountant. His paternal grandmother was taken from her home and sold as a servant when she was a child, and his maternal grandfather was a barber. Although his maternal grandparents are still alive and his mother is very close to them, he knows nothing about them. Lam grew up in Boston, MA, where he got his k-12 education. He went to Josiah Quincy Elementary School for grades one to five, transferred to Josiah Quincy Upper School for grade six, and transferred to Boston Latin School where he studied for grades seven to twelve. Through his high school academic career, Lam performed poorly in freshman and sophomore year which explains the 1.98 GPA he had. In his junior year, he stepped up and did significantly better getting a 3.55 and a 3.8 senior year. He finished high school with a 2.7 cumulative GPA. For a significant part of his academic career that involved writing, he has been asked to take positions on arguments until about Junior year of high school when he was challenged to formulate his own ideas and argue for them. He believes that this is a very important part of his education because we all have our own opinions and ideas, but to be able to defend your beliefs as well as convince others that what you believe is right is vital to success.

Political views
Growing up in Massachusetts, Lam grew up adopting a very liberal standpoint. Lam votes relatively democratically and sides with liberals in political debates. For example, Lam is pro-gun control without infringing on the 2nd amendment, pro-woman's rights to choose what medical procedures they wish to have done, etc. Some topics that Lam leans more conservatively towards is keeping marijuana illegal.

Career
Lam wants to be a doctor. He claims thought originated while watching The Walking Dead. He had a train of thought that led him to question what kind of people would be valuable in an apocalypse and one of those answers was a doctor. They were people that were well respected by society and knowledgable so their status would never fade. This was not a career aspiration at the time until he began watching medical dramas like House M.D. and Grey's Anatomy. Lam claims that those shows demonstrated the good that doctors can do in the lives of their patients and that although the happiness and joy in the eyes of the actors was not genuine, he understood that the impact doctors could have in the lives of others could be great. Now, the only reason he does it is to guarantee his value to the others human survivors when the apocalypse dawns on us.

Beginning in the summer following his sophomore year, Lam began working summer jobs. In the summer of 2016, Lam worked at Partners HealthCare in the Information Systems (IS) department. There, he learned how to image computers with custom operating systems (OS), set up encryptions, and securely destroy data. The next two summers, Lam worked at Tufts Medical Center, the first year in the recruiting part of the Human Resources (HR) department and the second year in the General Surgery department. While working in the General Surgery department, Lam learned what working in the clinical setting be would be like.

Hobbies
Lam has many known hobbies like singing, playing video games, and watching tv-shows and movies. He sang tenor in chorus from eighth grade through twelfth grade. Starting in his eighth-grade year, he began playing computer games on Steam like Team Fortress 2. He continued to play many games with great skill until his sophomore year in high school. Lam follows many movie series as well as multiple tv-shows and has many special skills like being able to solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute. At an official World Cube Association (WCA) competition at Northeastern University, he had his fastest official recorded time at 46.41 seconds with an average of 52.58 seconds.

In his seventh grade, his mother forced him to play violin at school. Lam had no passion for it, it was a chore and so he did poorly. At the end of that year, there was a final and he failed. He got kicked out and was placed in chorus without knowing it. This was how he discovered something he loved to do, to sing with others to create sounds that were pleasant to the ear was challenging, but in a fun way. He loved to feel the group working together, he loved to hear the harmony, but it was simply the sound of music that made him fall in love with chorus.

Growing up, Lam didn’t have many friends. Most of his friends lived far away so they it made it hard for them to hang out. With the advancement of technology however, they found a way: multiplayer video games. They could all play together and talk to each other, all from the comforts of their very own home. Little did he know it; an addiction was forming. The need to be able to talk to people all the time was fulfilled by video games, where he could both play and talk. It wasn’t enough for him to just play with his friends, he needed to play all the time.

In his sophomore year, a fellow classmate, Joshua L. who now studies at Cornell University, began to learn to solve the rubric’s cube. Sitting with him every day, Lam was sucked into this. He began to learn from watching and being taught. As he began to learn, he practiced day in and day out. Lam did this to both compete with Joshua, and to build a public image for himself. Even to this day, the idea that those who know how to solve rubric’s cubes are geniuses still persists. Lam wanted to be recognized for what he was, a genius.