About Me

If you want to learn about who I am as a professional, then go ahead and navigate yourself to my Professional Bio.

If you want to learn about who I actually am, then keep reading.

Hey. I’m Sam.

Basically, I want to optimize my human experience. Not in a weird way, like utilitarianism, or like that billionaire who gets blood transfusions from his son, but in a Karen-core “live laugh love” kind of way. 

It’s why I moved from Rhode Island to California for college. Well, the real reason is because UCLA went on that run as an eleven seed before Jalen Suggs hit a full court shot on them. Not that I ended up going to UCLA—and thank God for that.

It’s why I’m going to study abroad in Chile. I’m really looking forward to being forced to improve my Spanish as a survival mechanism, to seeing Torres Del Paine, and to saying the word “weon” all the time.

It’s not why I chose writing as a major, though. I still don’t know why I did that. I guess I liked it slightly more than math, economics, philosophy, film, environmental studies, and political science, the other options I tried.

Yeah, I want to see the best the world can offer. I want to go horseback riding in Kyrgyzstan and I want to be young and broke in New York and I want the Philadelphia 76ers to somehow win a championship in my lifetime.

But I’m not out here trying to greedily stack up miracles. I find just as much joy in weird little things, like eating blueberries and salt-n-vinegar chips in the same bite, operating a rented hydraulic wood splitter for twelve hours straight to cut the free truck bed of firewood I found on Facebook Marketplace, and finding a nice place to do my business. I love beating my friends in Catan, cracking open a can of cranberry-lime Polar seltzer in a quiet lecture hall, and going climbing. I’m always down to jump in the ocean at midnight.

I don’t think you can make a living out of any of these things, so they’re not going on my resume. But you match them up to my professional bio and tell me which one you prefer.

If you, too, feel like you’re so much more than your career, then this is the website for you. 

From the moment I read for the first time—the Bob Books collection, at age two—I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

In elementary school, I mapped out a ten-book fantasy saga called The Isle of Mysteria. In middle school, I wrote eighty pages of a gruesome slasher called Axed with my buddy James. By the end of high school, I felt like I had found my niche: character-driven short stories inflected with magical realism.

Now? As a rising senior in college painfully aware of both the need for job security and of the advent of AI, being a writer looks nothing like I had previously imagined.

I see writing not as one set career, but as a skill that I can take to nearly any industry; economic and technological shifts make it more crucial than ever, not less. To prepare myself, I’ve been getting my hands dirty in as many ways as possible.

I’ve honed my editing skills through my Professional Editing minor, my year as Marketing and Communications Editor of Spectrum Literary Journal, and my copyediting internship at Starting Lines.

I’ve written about social and economic inequities, receiving funding from URCA and earning a Raab Writing Fellowship for my paper “The Price of Productivity: Legislative Solutions to Make the H-2A Visa More Humane.”

I’ve practiced my communication and teaching skills at UCSB’s writing center, where I tutor over fifty people every quarter. Also, as one of one three tutors in the ACE program, I work alongside professors to help first-gen college students succeed in intro writing classes. Next year, I’ll be developing a new workshop program to teach on the largest scale yet.

This summer and fall, I’ll be studying abroad in Santiago, Chile, taking classes in Spanish and writing a travel blog. When I get back, I’ll be working on a collection of creative nonfiction and memoir about Isla Vista, my college town, for my Writing and Literature major’s capstone project.

From there, I look forward to graduating, and to the many careers I can have as a writer.