Welcome, Samuel Strom!

Samuel joined the ShadowBox team in June 2024. With a BS in Psychological Sciences with minors in Sociology and Communications from Purdue University, Samuel brings a unique perspective to ShadowBox. Take a look at Samuel’s bio to learn more! Welcome to the ShadowBox team, Samuel! 

A note from Samuel:

“One of the best “get to know you” questions I was ever asked was how I would describe myself if I only had three words to do so. While these words tend to change over time, the one that has been most enduring for me is “curious.” Curiosity is what propelled me through my time in college and led to a shift in focus to pursuing more research and application. It is a driving force for me in both my day-to-day and long-term planning.

When I came across ShadowBox, I thought that the concept of the work they did was inherently a process laced with curiosity. I was glad to find that this description of curiosity was one that ShadowBox, as an organization, shared with me as both an identifier and a value. Diving deeply into expertise requires a great degree of curiosity. There are so many questions to be asked of those who have such a wealth of experience. There is so much to learn about a given domain before you can begin to ask deeply meaningful, effective, and informed questions.

During my first couple of weeks at ShadowBox, I found it so interesting to talk to the people who have been doing this for longer. It seems that after working closely on projects, ShadowBox employees became a kind of secondary expert on the domains they are working in. I think that is a testament to how curiosity permeates the work that ShadowBox does. It also is interesting to me how curiosity is one of the marks of the experts themselves. In this way, ShadowBox embodies the very material that it focuses on.           

I hope to always be a curious person, and I can’t wait to see where this takes me in terms of the many things that I will learn and the many people I will meet.”