About Me

Profile

About: Forged in the crucible of northern Dallas suburbia, Drew trekked south to his current residence as a third year architecture student. Drew occasionally escapes the studio to dabble around campus in the Undergraduate Architecture Student Council, Texas 4000, Camp Texas, Texas Blazers, and the Tejas Club. Outside of the 40 Acres, he dedicates himself to the exploration of the endless food, music, parks, and excitement that the 512 has to offer, most of the time with a group of buds. He spent the past summer interning at an architectural practice back home in Dallas.

Why I Ride

Where cancer steals, I desire to give. For as long as I can remember, the idea of cancer has existed in my family, specifically in my mother. Luckily, the extent of my memory does not provide me with the worst parts: the chemotherapy, the exhaustion, the fear. For me cancer was semi-annual checkups transitioning to annual checkups finally ending with a diagnosis of full remission. At four years old I knew very little about my mother’s diagnosis with Hodgkin’s lymphoma fairly early in its formation. Spared from the details of the process of ridding her body with disease where her own cells attempted to take her life, I was also spared from the incredible tragedy many people suffer when losing a loved one to cancer. I cannot imagine a world without my mother, a world consisting of much less love, kindness, and wisdom, a world where the cancer research that allowed my mother to fight back and win against such a deadly disease did not exist. Luckily now we live in a time where cancer garners incredible attention from both the public and researchers worldwide. This attention moves the fight against cancer forward, with the hope that the fight my mom went through is no longer necessary. As I grew and my mother dutifully went to her appointments, I learned more and more about the disease, and I grew confident, with as much as we know about cancer now, that the fear I first felt when hearing about my mother going to a checkup was unnecessary, and when I learned of my grandfather’s colon cancer diagnosis two years ago, I possessed a hope, a hope based on the efforts of many people fighting the disease from so many different directions, that he would survive with no trouble, as he did a few short months after the initial finding. The ability to instill that optimism in even one person drives me to desire to ride in 2018.