Lopez and his daughter Annie at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.Īnd so Lopez decided to get a college degree in math, a subject he had been passionate about since he was a child. And after breaking his leg on a jump, Lopez knew he wouldn’t be of much use to the military. Lopez initially wanted to serve longer, but he had a family to look after. Since they were married, the Army allowed the couple to live together in Germany.
I’m going to join the Army too,” Lopez says. “I was thinking, ‘He is going to go off to have adventures and trump through the woods as a soldier. Right before leaving, he proposed to Rose. The Miami native was assigned to be a paratrooper in Germany. He shifted his focus away from music as he acted on a desire to serve his country. “It was then that I started to realize, I just couldn’t be that guy to do nutty stuff to get my music known,” Lopez says.
It was triggered by seeing a poster of the Rolling Stones, where each member of the rock group was dressed head-to-toe in eccentric clothes. It all came to a conclusion when a thought entered Lopez’s head that forced him to reconsider his career. I guess I’m just a junkie for that feeling,” Lopez says.Īt some shows the band was loved and at some shows they were “just so, so bad,” Rose recalls. It’s just having the gooseballs to go up there. It’s not even about anyone liking it or anything. “My favorite part was getting up there in front of a bunch of strangers and singing a song you wrote. From left to right: Rose Lopez, Michael Lopez, Emily D’Andrea and Sean Zwicke. After a couple years, they moved to Nashville and recruited more musicians to their group. They formed a four-piece band called The Heavy Love Cult. There, they built up their musical chops while living in a basement apartment. They packed their bags and moved to Chicago. So I said, ‘OK,’” says Rose Lopez MFA ’20, now Michael’s wife. “He said, ‘I need you to play with me.’ And I loved him. He had a friend named Rose whom he knew from his day job at Starbucks. The young performer played at bars and clubs across Miami.Īfter a couple of years playing, Lopez decided his solo act needed to expand.
He learned the guitar and harmonica, spending his time in libraries studying song books.
#Fiu edu math department professional#
Lopez was set on becoming a professional musician. “I heard Bob Dylan when I was a younger guy, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I could totally do that,’” Lopez says of the famed singer-songwriter. After breaking all of his boards, though, Lopez chose a new hobby. He and his cousins were surfers who roamed up and down the Florida coastline looking for the tallest waves. It is a maturity that Lopez built by seeing a lot of the world.īorn to Cuban parents in Hialeah, Lopez had a taste for adventure growing up. And that is because of his mathematical maturity.” “He is able to see the big picture better than most people. “He got a 100 percent on his first two exams,” remembers Professor Taje Ramsamujh in the Department of Math and Statistics. He was what some professors call a “mature student.” Although faculty don’t receive dates of birth or personal contact information from their pupils, a student’s performance sometimes makes it clear that he or she is not 18 years old. Lopez is beginning a job at NASA as an optical engineer, someone who works with telescopes and other visual technology. But without them, we can’t do all of these really cool things like split the atom, or build computers, or be able to talk to each other over the Internet,” Lopez says. You can’t see a derivative or an integral. The stuff we math people do, you can’t see. “I feel like a wizard, to be honest with you. And he finds it just as engaging as his other stops. Now, using his degree from FIU, Lopez is beginning another career: mathematics. Army in Germany before busting his leg on a jump. In his 30s, he became a paratrooper for the U.S. In his 20s, he picked up a guitar, started a folk-rock band and moved to Nashville. Michael Lopez ’20 is a bit of a thrill-seeker.
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