[This story originally ran in the May 2019 issue of the Alumni Newsletter.]
Sparks flew early for lab partners and Chapter Officers, who are now married.
Li and Liana met freshman year of college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign while living on different floors of the same dorm hall. Both in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program, they kept seeing each other in classes, and Li kept mysteriously finding excuses to be wherever Liana was outside of class. Eventually, Liana caught on that he might kinda like her, and they started dating. Lab partners for most of their major classes, the couple supported each other through their difficult engineering curriculum.
One day, they received an email announcing that HKN was looking for new initiates. Always the more ambitious of the two, Liana persuaded Li that it would be good for their resumes to do it — and hey, it might even be a little fun!
They went through initiation together and became board members the very next semester. The following year, they decided to step up their game and run for President and Vice President. Both distinctly remember having to abstain from voting for each other citing conflict of interest! As new leaders of Alpha Chapter, Li made it his mission to make for more effective board meetings, while Liana worked to
improve the chapter’s relations with the department.
Five years later, Li and Liana are happily married living in Austin, Texas, both working in the semiconductor industry at Arm, Inc. They still look back fondly on the time they spent with their fellow board members making HKN Alpha Chapter better than ever!
