Prior to going to college, I had a pretty strong accent, and that was one of the things I had to work on a lot. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts; my speech teacher... that was one of the things we really had to work on over the years, and ...
I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sunda...
I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city's worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and...
The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me a...
I'd always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, 'You know, you'll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,'...
I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give b...
I was nerdy girl who went to Catholic school and wanted to be an engineer. I was all set to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology. And then I took a hard left turn and studied Liberal Arts at Northern Illinois University, majored in Communicati...
Scientists at MIT and engineering schools all across America say that they could improve the fuel economy standards for the existing set of vehicles by 10 miles per gallon using existing technology, without compromising safety or comfort at all.
An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and...
I did martial arts since I was 10 years old, and I've got as much love for the movies as I have for martial arts, so when I was 18 years old, I started studying performing arts with the eye of getting into the film industry and went to drama school a...
It is hard to rationalise or explain why you love what you love. But I have always been interested in science and maths, and in high school I was struck that you could use maths to understand nature and science.
I was on the improv team in high school, and after I graduated, I joined an improv company that had been established 10 years prior to me getting there. They did longform improv, and I fell in love with it. It's acting, character creation, collaborat...
I love Snoop. I worked with him on 'Old School,' and he's very accessible. He's very kind. He's always nice to everyone, to the crew. He's always got something positive to say. He's very childlike and loves to come and play. So, I had fun working wit...
Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just t...
To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early '90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you're looking a...
I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.
It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
I wanted to be a vet, a nurse, a chef - I mean, anything but the music industry. But once I hit high school, the bug really bit me. You can't deny where you come from and what's in your genes, and music definitely was. I haven't looked back since.
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.
When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consc...
The Navy's paid for you to go through school, and then they need doctors to go out and take care of people who are in various different parts of the world. I decided to pay back my time first as an undersea medical officer. I was stationed in Scotlan...
