about me.

hi! i'm shawn, legally known as sihyun.

welcome to my personal portfolio website — or, well, more accurately, the portfolio website that chatgpt put together for me. ai really making huge leaps forward in the journey to make me unemployed.

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 cmu, i was a sergeant in the republic of korea army, a u-17 national lacrosse player, head of media production for my high school's student council, principal cellist for amis european honor orchestra, and even a mathcounts nationals finalist. you can probably tell i had a lot of interests, and i still do — right now i'm just trying to figure out what truly excites me.

i think for now, i'm fascinated by low-level systems work — where performance meets elegance. i'll be joining jump trading in 2026 as a software engineer. before that, i worked at bodo.ai building a parallel sql engine, and with prof. louis-philippe morency at cmu's multicomp lab, where we published an acl 2024 paper on large language models.

outside of work, i make music, climb, take photos, and spend time with people who i trust and care about.

welcome! if you've read this far, you get a virtual hug from me!