Year: 2017
House: Currier
Concentration: Undecided
Hometown: I was born in South Korea and have lived in Vietnam for the past eight years.
Relationship status: Single
Describe yourself in 3 words: Crazy, Passionate, Lazy
If you were ice cream, you’d be: Frozen yogurt
Best physical trait: Smile
Favorite place in Harvard Square: The Starbucks by the T
Tell us about your summer plans:
So this summer my friends and I are going to do a road trip from San Francisco to Boston starting in early July and arriving in Boston on approximately August 20th, a couple of weeks before school starts. We’re gonna write a tour guide book for wheelchair accessibility; specifically, we’re going to write for Let’s Go, a Harvard tour guide book company.
When did you know this is what you wanted to do?
Since I was young, my parents and my family have been traveling a lot, and since I lived abroad a couple years, I love moving around a lot too. I felt that it would be fun to do a road trip in the states and probably to travel around the world once in my lifetime. I thought about doing it as a graduation trip, but I’ve talked to a lot of seniors about it and they said if you don’t get a job by the end of senior year, you spend the summer doing an internship or something else, so freshman summer is the time when you can do crazy stuff like this. So I said, “Let’s do it.”
Which city are you most excited to visit and why?
I’m actually excited about every city I’m going to go to. I’m just excited for the whole trip in general. The idea of going to different cities across the states is just fun.
What was it like fundraising for your project? Have you reached your goal yet? What was the hardest part?
So we’re actually $170 short from the goal. Our goal was $6,000 and we have about $5,800. In three or four weeks we’ve been able to raise this much so I’m really happy about it, but one of the most difficult parts was contacting people to ask for money. The project has meaning behind it, but also sometimes has the general feeling that they’re just paying for my trip. I had to learn how to phrase it to say that I’m actually going to make places more friendly to people in wheelchairs. Another part is that $6,000 is only the minimal cost to start the trip. We’ve actually estimated around $15,000. We’ve been able to get some sponsorships from Hertz and some other hotels, gratefully, so we think it should be alright, and also we’ve applied for grants through the Christopher Reeve foundation for which the results come out in June. We also got a lot of help from the FDO in terms of getting the word out and Dean Pfister sent an email out as a shout out. People around me helped a lot in terms of spreading the word. The video was one of the hardest parts, it took 2-3 weeks.
What would you like Harvard students to learn from your project?
I feel like a lot of Harvard students feel that when they want to do something, it has to be perfect and it has to be something really grandiose to even think about doing it. I feel like just having the guts to try it out, that spirit might be really helpful for people. I’ve met a lot of people with really awesome ideas, but they thought “Oh, it’s not going to work” or “It’s not practical enough”. So they didn’t start what they wanted to do. But if you don’t even start, how do you know if something is going to be good or bad? Even if you fail, at the end of the day you’ll learn something from the experience, and what really matters is the experience.
As you plan for your own summer adventures, keep up to date with Kunho and his team at the Wheel Project 2014 site! To learn more, you can also watch their promotional video.