In a perfectly ordinary apartment where nothing magical ever happened unless you count the microwave finally heating food evenly, I was raised on two reliable forces: love and necessity. I’m an immigrant and a first-gen college student, so “resourceful” is my middle name. We didn’t have much money for new toys, which sounds unfortunate until you realize it accidentally gave me my first engineering lab and my passion. My happiest moments were with broken toys, the kind most kids would toss aside. I treated them like mysteries. I’d crack them open to figure out what made them tick, then try to revive them after their inevitable demise, often caused by my own extremely rigorous experiments like “what if I bend this” or “what if I press every button at once.”

Somewhere between missing screws and questionable reassembly, I learned problem solving early. If I can understand how something works, I can fix it, reverse engineer it, and probably add a modification that makes it slightly better or at least more interesting. When I got to college, I tried pre-med track because science scratched the same curiosity itch. But something was missing. After switching majors a few times, I found Computer Science and it clicked. CS gave me my favorite two step passion: first, understand the system. Second, get hands on and iterate over it. Now instead of toys, it’s software. I’ve taught myself most of what I know because I genuinely love learning, and because deep down I’m still that kid staring at a broken thing thinking, alright, show me what makes you tick.