User:KrisWatkins96

I was born in Oxford, England and quickly made the move to the great "country" of Texas (yeah I love Texas a lot). I grew up in Elgin, Texas and played just about every sport except baseball (because I'm awful at it). My favorite sport will always be football, but due to a lot of injuries I had to switch to golf. I played on the Southern Texas PGA tour and competed in the summer championship event twice. During my undergrad education at Concordia University Texas I played a lot of competitive golf for money and made about 7k year a off of it. I also worked at a golf course, taught at Mathnasium, studied computer science and mathematics, and played video games semi-professionally.

After undergrad I left Austin and moved to College Station, Texas to pursue a Masters degree in Mathematics with the intent of switching into the PhD program at Texas A&M University. While I was doing my Masters degree I worked at Mathnasium in both Bryan and College Station, and I also worked as an organizer for TAMU Math Circle. With the help of Dr.Phil Yasskin and Dr.Junehyuk Jung, I was able to obtain a summer internship at John Hopkins Careers for Talented Youth program. During the course of my Masters degree under the advice of Dr. Mauric Rojas, I found that I truly enjoyed quantum cryptography and I had planned on graduating and going elsewhere for a PhD degree in mathematics with a focus on Quantum Cryptography. However, during the JHU CTY internship I met some great friends and applied for some new jobs. After obtaining some job offers I had switched my plan to just graduating and going into the workforce. However, because of some security processing I knew that I'd have to find something else to do for the Spring semester of 2020 so I became a Lecturer at TAMU because of my love of teaching. During this semester my love for teaching grew even more (despite the crazy COVID-19 situations) and so I made the decision to stay here long term.

For some background information on my hobbies and stuff I'd say that my main hobbies right now are gaming, playing basketball, and going to Hullabaloo Diner (their breakfast is amazing). Particularly I play a lot of Tom Clancy games, league of legends, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and CS GO. I also really enjoy hiking and going on tough trails like the River Place Nature Trail in Austin, Texas. I have an orange male cat who's very annoying and can fool anybody into thinking he's cute an sweet. His name is Teemo (named after the most annoying champion in League of Legends). Also, if you can't tell, I'm a huge Florida Gator fan (I started before the Tebow era so you can't hit me with bandwagoning comments especially after enduring the stretch of 5 games where our defense scored as many points as our offense).