One of the men competing on "The Bachelorette" grew up in Excelsior and graduated from the University of Minnesota and the University of St. Thomas.
John Buresh, who now lives in New York, is among the 10 contestants still vying for Charity Lawson, a child and family therapist in Georgia, on the ABC-TV reality series. The 27-year-old is a data scientist and "the perfect combination of looks and intelligence," according to his cast bio. The show airs Mondays.
Introducing himself when the 20th season of the show debuted on June 26, Buresh gave Lawson a fortune cookie. "It's a little Chinese, a little American," he said. "I'm a little Chinese, a little American."
She read the fortune aloud, laughing: "'You will meet the man of your dreams tonight. His name is John.' "
"I'm just as shocked as you are," he said. "You picked a good one."
If he's not a match for Lawson, some fans hope Buresh might become the first Asian star of "The Bachelor." One host of the podcast "Game of Roses" — which treats the show as a competitive sport and has long advocated for more diversity among its stars — picked Buresh as her MVP of the first episode.
According to his Linkedin profile, Buresh works at an investment firm, which he does not name: "I direct the companywide Data Science strategy and partnerships with data vendors, and build regression models to analyze and predict the performance of healthcare stocks."
He graduated from St. Thomas in 2021 with a master's degree in business analytics and, before that, from the U's Carlson School of Management in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in business management.
