Aspiring Forward Deployed Engineer
Hello, and welcome to my personal portfolio! I'm a third year at UT Austin studying Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering. I am currently on a gap year completing my Korean mandatory service as a KATUSA, working alongside the US Army. I focus on building practical AI tools for everyday problems. Outside of work, I spend my time playing classical piano, practicing Taekwondo (4th deg. Black belt), or working on one of the personal projects below!
Secure military medical-records system built around a Windows admin station, encrypted NFC dog tags, and ESP32 field-reader hardware. Gathered and led the team to 7th place out of 700 teams for the ROK Army Startup Competition. Awarded and promoted by the Korea Economic Daily News & ROK Department of Defense. Learn More...
Desktop app that intercepts impulsive game launches and shows a todo checklist before the game can open, with categorized activity analytics, AI-generated feedback, and smart reminders built in. Reached 50+ users in the first week of release. Learn More...
Production-oriented system for managing professors, courses, course plans, lectures, reports, permissions, analytics, audit logs, XLSX workflows, and AI document parsing. Learn More...
Paper-only Alpaca trading bot running 24/7 on a VPS with portfolio metrics, multi-strategy allocation, backtesting, live logs, and kill-switch controls. Learn More...
Deployed web MVP for guided activity completion, AI concierge onboarding, sample login, activity records, messages, notifications, and OAuth groundwork. Learn More...
Co-authored two SCI-level papers applying AI to psychiatric records and antidepressant-related social media data. Learn More...
56M, 8A 2ID DSB UMT
Combined Forces service, tactical translation, and religious-support operations inside a U.S.-ROK Army environment.
UT Austin CS & ECE
One of roughly four students in my class pursuing both CS and ECE, balancing software, systems, circuits, and math-heavy engineering work.
Two cultures
Spent 11 years in Korea and 10 in America, learning how to adapt across language, school systems, and culture.
I am completing my mandatory Korean military service as a KATUSA, serving as a 56M chaplain assistant in the 8th Army, 2nd Infantry Division Sustainment Brigade Unit Ministry Team. The role placed me inside a U.S.-ROK Combined Forces environment, where Korean and American soldiers plan, train, and operate together. Working in that setting taught me to communicate with precision across rank, language, and culture, especially when translating tactical context during combined training.
During bootcamp, I earned Commandant's List by ranking top 4 out of 160 soldiers in my graduating class. I later received both the Army Achievement Medal and the Army Commendation Medal from Major General Lombardo for tactical translation services that helped bridge Korean and U.S. personnel during field operations. I also had opportunities to work with UNC and meet the Secretary of War and USFK General Brunson, which made the scale and purpose of combined service feel much more real and inspiring.
At UT Austin, I am studying CS & ECE as one of roughly four students in my graduating class pursuing both Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The path exposed me to two demanding ways of thinking: software abstraction, algorithms, and systems on one side, and circuits, hardware constraints, and math-heavy engineering on the other.
Accepting that workload also opened doors to competitive student organizations and department-level opportunities. Through Texas Convergent, I built an NFC sleep alarm and pitched it to more than 200 students in the organization, which pushed me to think about engineering as both a technical build and a product story. I also had the chance to interview faculty applicants to the ECE department, giving me a rare look at how a top engineering department evaluates future professors and research directions.
On the research side, I led paper discussions with two PhD students through DiRP, UT Austin's Directed Reading Program for computer science. Those discussions made research feel more active and conversational: not just reading a paper, but asking what assumptions it makes, where the method breaks, and how the idea could turn into something buildable.
Taking both majors has often meant carrying a workload beyond what felt comfortable. Over time, that became useful training. It taught me how to break large technical problems into pieces, keep moving when the schedule is tight, and build projects that respect both product behavior and engineering limits.
I spent 11 years in Korea and 10 years in America. When I was 10, I moved to Oklahoma with my mother and entered public school before I could speak English. That experience was uncomfortable, but it became the first real proof that I could rebuild myself in a new environment by observing carefully, asking for help, and improving a little every day.
After three years in Oklahoma, I returned to Korean middle school and experienced the typical Korean academic system: repetition, memorization, long hours, and constant comparison against peers. I learned discipline from it, but I also realized that simply competing inside a fixed track was not the way I wanted to grow.
I then spent a year as an exchange student in Missouri. COVID-19 broke out during that period, so the normal exchange-student experience disappeared almost overnight. Instead of treating the year as lost time, I tried to get something meaningful out of it by helping create virtual activities that local students could still join and use to stay connected.
Later, when I decided that I wanted to attend college in the United States, I applied to The Stony Brook School in New York. Living there gave me a broader view of the U.S. beyond the Midwest, and being near Renaissance Technologies sparked my early curiosity about quantitative finance: the idea that mathematics, computing, and markets could intersect. I see myself as a true combination of Korean and American cultures, shaped by both systems rather than only one.