We met in the summer of 2019 while we were both interns at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. By a bit of serendipity, our Argonne supervisors were dating at the time and often organized group lunches for the interns, and that’s where we first met. Not long after, Max asked Qiuyi out to dinner after a workshop at UChicago, and that simple evening turned into something much more. At the time, Qiuyi was about to begin her PhD in Statistics at University of Rochester, and Max was heading into his second year of PhD in Mathematics at Boston University. When the summer ended, we decided to take a leap and continue our relationship long-distance. What followed were many miles, flights, and road trips. Between Boston and Rochester, to New York City and Maryland, and even across the world to China. Those early days were filled with travel, effort, and a growing certainty that we had found something truly meaningful.