The longer version

I've been on my own since I was 18, by necessity rather than choice.

I grew up in an affluent, mostly white suburb of Boston, in a Korean immigrant family that didn't fit the mold. My parents ran a convenience store in a tough neighborhood, 6am to 11pm, no days off. I was the sixth of seven. By age 8 I was taking public transit an hour on my own to get to the store. My grades were terrible, not for lack of intellect but because there was no room at home to think.

Wheaton College changed that. Within two years I was running the campus newspaper and had taken it from bimonthly to weekly. My freshman year spring my parents told me they were no longer able to support me. When I asked why, they said, "Well, Christine, you always seem to figure things out."

So that's what I did. I graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and was part of Wheaton's first class of White House interns.

Then every Ph.D. program turned me down. I had no lab experience, so I went and got it, and earned a Master's at night while I worked full-time at Brandeis University. I applied again. That time everyone said yes. I funded the Ph.D. (Queen’s University) and the postdoc myself on NIH grants I won, one of them the first in my department's history. I completed my postdoctoral fellowship in auditory neurology at Mass. General, MIT, and Harvard Medical School.

I left academia in 2006 with no plan and fifteen years of practice at finding my own way.

Everything I have built since 2006, I have built from scratch. A media brand started at midnight with a baby on my hip. A book. Two podcasts. Two design businesses. Then creative director on campaigns for the American Cancer Society, Heifer International, and the CDC. Now I run my own practice.

Colleagues started calling me The Diplomat. Not because I smooth things over, but because I can walk into the hardest rooms, make space for what's actually happening, and build what comes after.