Joe and Kate initially met in 2009 when he was her teaching assistant for her engineering 101 class at USD. Neither of them could have predicted that they had just met their future spouse - in fact, Kate actually tried to drop Joe’s class to take an honors chemistry preceptorial instead (a fact that Joe still doesn’t let her live down). After Kate formally switched from engineering to pursue genetic counseling, the two of them stayed acquaintances and had mutual friends in common, but didn’t see much of each other except in passing on campus. After graduating in 2011, Joe started working in Orange County, and Kate moved to Michigan to start graduate school in 2013. They wouldn’t meet again until a chance encounter in 2015...

By now, Joe was living in Huntington Beach and working in biomedical engineering in Tustin. Kate had just graduated from the University of Michigan and had taken her first genetic counseling job in Orange County (the stars were aligning). She had decided to move to Huntington Beach, and after a long day of apartment hunting, she went for a sunset run at the pier. Afterwards, she was hungry and decided to jog to the only restaurant she knew in the neighborhood at that time, which was just across Pacific Coast Highway at Main Street. Given that Joe lived a block away from the beach, he often took Pacific Coast Highway to get home. While stopped at the light at Main Street, he happened to see a girl running in the crosswalk in front of his car that looked a lot like his old student Kate Partynski. He went home and sent her a message on Facebook asking if she had just been out running in Huntington Beach by the pier (not to be creepy!) because he could have sworn he just saw her. After double checking that Joe wasn’t stalking Kate, they went out to breakfast, became friends, and soon after realized that they had a lot in common and there might be something more. The rest is history.

Kate and Joe knew that they wanted to build their life together, and Joe wanted a special location to pop the question. A few months after some hushed conversations with parents, and Joe working quietly designing a ring for Kate, the couple decided to take a “spontaneous” dinner trip to San Diego for the last weekend of the summer. Reservations were for 8:30pm so why not see the sunset in Torrey Pines (Kate’s favorite beach) first? Unfortunately, Kate didn’t want to spend a beautiful summer day sitting in traffic when they could go somewhere for dinner at home in Orange County instead. Joe persisted though, and they made it down to Torrey Pines beach 30 minutes before sunset - plenty of time for a beach walk. Joe insisted that the views were better at the top of the Torrey Pines cliffs, and Kate reluctantly obliged. “In this heat?! In sandals?!” After a quick but strenuous hike up the cliffs in their dinner attire, and after some sweat and mosquito bites, they found a nice bench on the hillside to watch the sunset. As luck would have it, the sunset was nearly nonexistent. Joe wouldn’t let this thwart his long awaited plans, however! He took the ring out of his pocket, knelt down, and the answer was YES! The view at the top really is better, especially with your fiance by your side.