2007 Youth Award Recipient Keone Hon Blogs for HHF

First Post

Hello! My name is Keone, and I’m really excited to be a guest blogger for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation.

I’m a rising sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, MA, where I’m studying Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS), just like Eletha, who blogged here a bit earlier. (I see Eletha around MIT a lot, as we lived in the same dorm this year, and we were both recipients of the HHF’s youth award in the engineering & mathematics category—her in 2006 and I in 2007.)

I grew up in California and Nevada and spent most of my high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in Exeter, NH, that is nothing like the stereotypes you’ve heard about prep schools. (Okay…I guess it’s true that the buildings are old and the classes are tough…but the people are really nice!)

Around MIT, I’m busy with classes in computer science, math, and Arabic, a language I took up two years ago on a whim. I also involved in MIT’s student government, mostly through my service as president of the Association of Student Activities, the governing body for MIT student clubs. I also help with the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, an annual math contest for high schoolers, and this year I’m co-coordinating an orientation program for incoming freshmen who are interested in EECS. Next year I’m also hoping to join the MIT Ultimate Frisbee team. I’m also in a fraternity.

This summer I’m working at the Broad Institute, which is a joint program of MIT and Harvard designed to develop new technologies (particularly in genomics) to be used in medicine. More specifically, I work on automated cell image analysis in the Imaging Platform, which is one of the divisions of the Broad (as it’s commonly referred to; by the way, it’s pronounced as if it rhymes with “road” or “’toad”). I’ll probably write more about my project in another entry, but for now, let me say that I love my work.

Outside of work, I serve as a counselor for the Research Science Institute (RSI), a summer program for rising high school seniors who stay at MIT and do research in MIT and Boston-area labs in the “STEM” subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math). Actually, I guess I should say “I served” because I’m sad to report that the program concluded at the beginning of August. It was a lot of fun and I miss the kids a lot; the fact that I’m writing now might have something to do with being sad about missing them.

That’s pretty much all for now, but like I said, I’ll be elaborating on different portions of my life and this summer in the coming entries. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.