Early Life and Education
Kwon was born in Flushing in the Queens borough of New York City, to South Korean immigrants. He moved to Concord, California and attended Northgate High School, in Walnut Creek, where he graduated valedictorian and played varsity water polo and track and field.
Kwon attended college at Stanford University, graduating in 1997 with a B.S. degree in Symbolic Systems and is a brother of Lambda Phi Epsilon Fraternity. As a student, he earned recognition for both academic achievement (Phi Beta Kappa) and community service (James Lyons Award).
In his sophomore year, Kwon’s childhood friend and roommate, Evan Chen, was diagnosed with a terminal case of leukemia. Kwon organized an intense nationwide bone marrow campaign in an effort to find a bone marrow donor for his friend. Although the search was successful and Chen underwent a marrow transplant, the procedure ultimately failed and Chen died two years later. Kwon continues to organize bone marrow drives and serves as a national spokesperson for the Asian American Donor Program.
After graduation from Stanford, Kwon attended Yale Law School, where he earned a J.D. in 2000 and was an editor on The Yale Law Journal.
Read more about this topic: Yul Kwon
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)