Hello!
I'm Shawn. Legally known as Sihyun.
Welcome to my personal portfolio website!
...no, that's a huge overstatement.
Uh... welcome to the thing that is a conglomeration of crudely constructed HTML, CSS, and JS code snippets that I copy-pasted from StackOverflow and Youtube.
I'm not even joking -- that's all that this is. The fancy navbar at the top? That cool typewriter effect? The pretty animations on my projects? That's all just copy-pasted code that I spent hours tweaking.
Then again, that's most industry code for you.
Right now, I'm a junior at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. But my life has taken me all around the world -- from Seoul to New Delhi to Johannesburg to Pittsburgh. I've lived in 4 different countries for an extended period of time, and I've visited way more. My family is still moving around without me -- they're currently in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, so who knows what will happen next?
It's led to an interesting situation where I don't really know where I can call home anymore. But I'm okay with that. I think whereever the people I care most about are is home to me. And as of now, that's Pittsburgh :)
Before I came to CMU, I was a sergeant in the Republic of Korea Army, a U-17 national-level lacrosse player for Korea, head of media production for my high school's student council, chair position cello for AMIS European Honor Orchestra, and somehow also competed in Mathcounts Nationals 2015. As you can tell, I had a lot of interests. But I unfortunately peaked in middle/high school and am no longer any of these, and so I'm trying to find out what I really am interested in professionally.
I think as of the near future, my interests lie in low-level systems. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to receive offers from a few quantatative trading firms this year, and so I'll be interning at Jump Trading next summer, learning about writing optimized performant code. Super exciting!
Previously, I was at Bodo.ai, a Pittsburgh-based startup, where I worked on helping create a highly parallelizable SQL engine. And before that, I worked with Prof. Louis-Phillipe Morency to publish an ACL 2024 paper on large language models.
I like making music, photo/videography, and spending time with people I trust and care about.
Welcome! If you've read this far, you get a virtual hug from me. :)