Ryan Mitchell: So, Cory, tell us about where you grew up.
Cory Dolphin: I grew up in Weston, it’s about 8 miles over. I was only there until I was 10.
RM: Are your parents engineers?
CD: My father has a masters of engineering, but he’s a biophysicist.
RM: Was he excited about you applying to Olin?
CD: Yeah! I mean, my parents wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do. I played with Legos, I played with Kinex, built cranes, I mean, it was pretty clear what my passions were, what direction I was going in. I loved to visit MIT, and I was pretty sure that’s where I wanted to be.
RM: So tell me a little about where you moved, after Massachusetts.
CD: Okay, after Massachusetts, I moved to New Zealand, a small island off of Auckland, called Waiheke island. It’s about 30 miles by ferry, about 8,000 residents. Yeah, it’s a tiny island, nice beach, pretty low-key. It’s kind of a tourist place — very chill. I lived there for about two years.
RM: What was it like, living in a tourist area?
CD: It was great. I lived near the beach. Sadly, the school was a joke, so I had to go up two and a half grades. So I was with much older kids. It was interesting. I was about 11 at the time, hanging out with 13-14 year olds, but it was definitely healthy for me.
RM: And where did you go after that?
CD: I then moved to Australia, the west coast, in Perth. It was spectacular, I loved it. It was further from the beach, a lot hotter, I went to a really good school, and definitely had a much better time.
And then my father decided to move back, [his employer] sold the sole company they had in the US, and the agreement was that he had to move to the UK for a while. So I went to a boarding school in Southern California, and would go back to London after breaks. And then I spent some time in France, mainly in Paris.
RM: So how many pages do you have left in your passport?
CD: I don’t know, I generally get them replaced. They’re all the extended pages. Yeah, I travel a lot.
RM: So, do you have any advice for navigating through foreign countries?
CD: Nope. Well, I’ve traveled through most of Europe, small parts of Asia. I’m actually going back to Cambodia and Laos over Spring Break, with my father. I mean, I don’t absolutely love traveling. I do enjoy it — I’m spoiled, but my dad and my brother love it, and it’s good to be with them.
RM: So do you have a major yet, at Olin?
CD: No. I’m not sure, there’s probably going to be some computing in there. A lot of computer science. I like computer science. I’m interning at Microsoft this summer, and if I enjoy my time there, I’ll probably continue doing more software and computer science stuff. If I don’t… I’ll do less.
RM: You mentioned that you had a software business in high school?
CD: So, I worked with web people, hacking an online game, it was written in Java, called Runescape. I developed a system so people could cheat, and sold it.
RM: So what exactly was the system?
CD: Basically, kind of automating basic movements in and around the game. So, a lot of the game was really boring, for obvious reasons, so they got a computer to do it for them. I was making a system that responded well and kind of accurately looked like a human. It was a website called RSCheata.
RM: Alright, well, I think that’s about it. Any dirty secrets?
CD: No dirty secrets. Well, none that you can know.
