Early Life, Education and Career
Born in Los Angeles, California, to a Chinese-American father and a Thai-American mother, Djou grew up in Hawaii. He graduated from the same high school as President Barack Obama, Punahou School, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and a Bachelor of Science in finance from the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania graduating magna cum laude. He earned his law degree at the University of Southern California Law School.
Djou is a major in the United States Army Reserve. He has taught as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Hawaii.
Djou served as the Vice Chairman of the Hawaii Republican Party from 1998 to 1999. He was named legislator of the year by Small Business Hawaii in 2002, 2004, and 2006. In 2006 he was selected as one of the 40 most promising leaders in Hawaii under age 40 by Pacific Business News, and in 2005 was named by Honolulu Weekly as the "Best Politician" in the state.
Read more about this topic: Charles Djou
Famous quotes containing the words early, education and/or career:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)