I was born and raised in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada where I attended elementary, junior high, and highschool. From the first days of grade school, I have been fascinated by social psychology. Even as a young student in elementary, I used to analyze my class and muse about why certain people were friends and others not.
It wasn't until grade nine, however, that I first began to think seriously about popularity. I had my friends but, like all students at one point or another, I wanted more--I wanted to be popular." Unsatisfied with the simplistic explanations available like "be yourself" and "have good social skills," I set out to understand the phenomenon of popularity myself.
Over the years, I watched my peers and documented what I saw in my journal. At first, my observations we're laughably simplistic but, over the years, things slowly started to make sense. By grade twelve, I was able to propose my first attempt at a theory and I summarized my ideas in an essay entitled, The Hierarchy of Attraction, Input of Energy and Respect in the summer after graduation.
After high school, I went straight into university and completed a double degree in Psychology and Business Management. In my final semester before convocation, I decided to dust off my original essay from high school and test it against published scientific research. The end result was a 18,000 word paper that merged my first hand observations from grade school with the rigorously scrutinized work of professional scientists.
Upon completion of the paper, I was amazed at the number of answers I had found in the scientific literature--they were all there. Yet surprisingly, no one had summarized them in way that was accessible to the people who cared most, students. So, before cementing my plans for summer 2011, I did a little more looking around online to see if any of the advice had changed from when I was in grade school—nothing had. The same old cliches about "being nice to everyone" and "having good people skills" were still being touted. If you glance through a handful of YouTube videos about popularity, you'll see what I mean. Because of the inadequacy of the advice otherwise available, I decided to spend my summer writing everything I knew down into a book entitled Popularity Explained: The Social Psychology of Grade School.
I graduated from University in May 2011 with a double Bachelor's Degree in Psychology (Great Distinction) and General Management (Great Distinction). I was honoured at convocation with a Gold Medal from the Faculty of Management for having the highest grade point average of my graduation class. Currently, I am studying medicine at the University of Alberta.
