Yaniv over at Hello World tagged me days ago regarding the “five things you don’t know about me” meme. I’ve been too overwhelmed to respond, but it’s time I got around to it. It reminds me, by the way, of the four things meme, which I suspect also revealed a bunch of things people don’t know about bloggers they read.

1. I grew up in Budapest with occasional short-term stays (lasting 4-21 months) in the U.S. specifically in Connecticut (twice), Texas and Hawaii by the time I was 16. Since then, I’ve lived in five additional states: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, in that order.

2. When I was 13, I wrote a fan letter to Dan Rather from Budapest. How much fan mail was he getting from teenagers in Hungary in the 1980s? Not much, I suspect. He kindly responded with an autographed photo (not that I had asked), which I found thrilling.

3. I was at the R.E.M. concert in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1995 when the band’s drummer collapsed due to a hemorrhage on the surface of his brain. A bunch of us from the Smith College Junior Year Abroad program went to this concert thanks to money we saved from our daily food allocation from the college.

4. When I was in middle school, I was interested in business (with aspirations of working on Wall Street one day) and so decided to study Japanese (this was the 80s after all). There was only one place you could study Japanese in Budapest at the time. It was fun, but due to subsequent US stays I had to abandon this particular interest.

5. My first choice for college was Cornell’s Communication Department thanks to the wonderful time I had attending the Cornell Summer College Program the summer before senior year of high school. I got in, but since Comm at Cornell is in one of their state schools and I was an international student, I did not qualify for financial aid. It was out of the question for me to attend a school in the US without financial aid. I was crushed. I was devastated. I ended up attending Smith College and absolutely loved it. In fact, I am convinced that it was a much better match than Cornell had been during its regular sessions so in the end all worked out well. Interestingly, years later, I did make my way to a communication department since that is where I am now based at Northwestern.

Finally, I’m supposed to tap five other people: Noor Ali-Hasan, Basket Case, Dan Drezner, Jeremy Freese and Seth Finkelstein – tell us a few things we don’t know about you.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 4:35 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.