I have tried to balance my activities between academics and athletics. My academic activities have included participation in the IMPACT gifted program, culminating in a trip to Europe. I was chosen for the honors science quarter at Fernbank Science Center, and most important, attended Career Discovery at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a six week intensive course in architecture.

In athletics, I have earned a letter in four different sports: swimming, track, football and wrestling. All my extracurricular activities have centered around athletics. I also like to lift weights and to run. I have run the Peachtree Road Race three times.

Most of my community activities are church-related. I have worked at a soup kitchen and at a night shelter for the homeless.

The rest of my time is spent with hobbies. My most long standing hobby is music, which I began at the age of four when I learned to play the piano. Later, I progressed to the clarinet and the bass clarinet, which I played in the elementary school band. I was also a member of the Atlanta Boy Choir, and sang in my church choir, where I was a soloist in several Christmas Cantatas. Now I play the guitar.

Because I am interested in Architecture, I spend a lot of time sketching houses. I have a lot of notebooks full of sketched houses.

I earn all of my own spending money. Some of my jobs have included work on a farm, in a hotel, in a sheet metal factory, in a pizza restaurant, in a grocery store and at a toy warehouse. Most of these jobs were not much fun, but they gave me money and experience.

I plan to become an architect. I plan to major in architecture in college, and then go to graduate school for a graduate degree.

(The above is the rough draft that Chris made for a college application form.)

What Chris did not mention was that he was enthralled with the "Spagetti Junction" overpass from the first day he saw a model of it at a mall when he was nine years old. Updated sketches of it have been found throughout his school year and college notes.

Chris went on to Georgia Tech as a NROTC scholarship student with a major in architecture, then civil engineering. Chris was a Junior and his beloved sister was a freshman (also at Georgia Tech) when he died. At the time, he was a Midshipman, and had also been on the Georgia Tech Rugby Club team for two years.

After his death in April we learned he was still working at his Christmas break job, doing store inventory at odd hours in the middle of the night.

Most people remember him for his hilarious sense of humor, his quickness to learn, his physical strength (at 194 lbs. he bench-pressed 375 lbs., a long standing record at his high school) and for his tender-hearted compassion for others.