About Me

Welcome to my website!

My name is Gokul Srinivasan. I am the left most person in the photo above! I am a resident of Salem, Oregon (which, contrary to popular opinion, is the bonafide capital of Oregon). In the following few paragraphs, I hope to leave you some insight into who I am as both a student and a person.

Now for the big question: who am I?

...A slave to my own curiosity.

So far, my academic and professional pursuits have been extremely varied — a seemingly disjointed journey spanning across initiatives in Disaster Preparedness, research in bioinformatics, study in math and science, and endless inquiry on philosophical, political, and anthropological topics. But, despite the apparent dissonance, an underlying curiosity binds all of these interests together: my obsession with humans, and how the world around us affects our lives. I'm lucky to say that in all of the roles I have assumed, I have been able to satisfy my passion in investigating the human condition as it relates to medicine, economics, politics, and technology.

I am driven by a burning curiosity to understand the world we live in, to understand the limits of the human condition, and to experience the thousands of flavors of life. I am motivated by the deep satisfaction that comes from building creative solutions to novel problems, and optimizing programs to maximize their human impact.

I've long been intent on joining and working with the DALI lab. Truth be told, it was the first program I applied to while at Dartmouth! Unfortunately I applied freshman fall as a complete novice with little experience coding anything substantive. Thankfully my experience has grown since then, and I am even more excited now than I was last. This is largely because I could participate in the DALI Web Development Mini course with Morgan Sorbaro. Getting the opportunity to create a functional web app was surreal, and I'm increasingly anticipating the chance to work with DALI to help create programs that are similarly exciting.

I know this is no resume so I'll keep my technical qualifications short; I am fairly proficient using html and css, but I am more confident in my javascript. Though this website was programmed using strict html, css, and js, I actually more prefer using React, and have created other apps using React. I recently had the opportunity to create a polling webapp for Dartmouth students using React where I gained proficiency using Firebase (which would have been impossible without the guidance of Annika Kouhia), though I also have experience using MongoDB. I suppose outside of web development, I most enjoy programming in Java! Java was my first language and it makes so much sense to me — though I'll admit javascript is growing on me.

There is a certain rush sharing an app that you've created with the rest of the world, knowing the countless hours of hard work that lie just beyond the beautiful surface, but it is an addictive feeling that I can't wait to pursue further while working with DALI.

I know this has been a wall of text to I'll leave you, my dear reader, with something interesting: though I was not extraordinarily notable in highschool, I gained notoriety in one regard — my usage of commas. Per the rumours spread through my class, not even the most experienced readers could navigate my "comma soup" (a name used to refer to my essays). As such, I hope there haven't been too many commas in the text above. If not, I hope you'll forgive me.