About Me

Here are the kinds of things I like to do in my free time:

I have played volleyball for pretty much as long as I can remember. Since both my parents played, I was introduced at a very young age. Although I played basketball in elementary school, when I got to junior high, I started playing club volleyball, and there's been no going back since. I played club all throughout junior high and high school, as well as college at UC Irvine, where I was even the club president for a year. Currently, I enjoy everything from indoor to grass to beach, playing beach whenever I can, participating in grass tournaments throughout the year, and going to high-level indoor open gyms multiple times per week.

Video games have been one of my favorite pastimes since childhood. They are one of the main reasons I chose Computer Game Science as a major: game design has always drawn my attention. Currently, the games I play most are World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. World of Warcraft has been my go-to game for the past ten years, but going from being a casual to getting Cutting Edge: Argus the Unmaker in Legion was a great accomplishment for me. In addition to simply playing the game, one of the things I enjoy most about it is being able to custom design my user interface to be exactly how I want it using numerous addons, as well as programming custom WeakAuras in Lua. I started playing Hearthstone during my freshman year of college, and since then, I have hit legend over twenty times and even started a Twitch stream recently to showcase my Hearthstone skills. In January 2019, I finished rank 2 Legend and had multiple rank 1s, even getting a few on stream, and in February 2019, I finished rank 6 Legend, as well as being the first player to reach legend in that season.

My dad first taught me chess when I was seven years-old, and since then, I have had some great successes in chess, winning youth tournaments, participating in chess clubs, and even being personally trained by an international master. More importantly, chess has shaped the person that I am today, altering the way that I think and approach problem-solving. While I currently do not play as much as I would like to, I still watch games on Youtube on a regular basis, and recently read quite an interesting book called Game Changer, which was about AlphaZero and its ground-breaking achievements in chess artificial intelligence.

Playing cards is one of the main ways that my family socializes at get-togethers. We usually play a game called Shanghai, but we also sometimes play Pounce and Poker. One of the things that I personally have done over the years is modify the rules to these games to introduce new levels of depth and complexity to make for new and interesting strategies. This is also one of my main influencers for going into Computer Game Science. I honestly love card games, from real cards with my family, to trading card games (I played Yu-Gi-Oh from age seven to seventeen), to digital card games (of course Hearthstone, but also Gwent, MTGArena, Elements, DuelingNetwork, etc.). I can accredit a lot of my planning and strategy skills in card games again to chess, as chess forces you to think many moves in advance.

While this may seem like a weird interest, I genuinely enjoy being able to quickly teach myself a new skill. This started at a young age, with things such as memorizing over 100 digits of pi, learning how to solve a Rubik's cube in a few minutes, etc. and as I grew older, it evolved into learning skills such as cutting my own hair, building a custom computer, cooking, investing in the stock market, and even building this website! It is so gratifying to go from having no knowledge on a topic to learning the basics to that a-ha moment to actually being skilled. Even though I am done with school, I will eternally be a student, and never stop learning until the day I die.

Feel free to email me any questions at jrok96 at gmail dot com.