How It Started

In sixth grade, I joined my middle school’s Technology Student Association (TSA) chapter. It was the first year my small charter school had ever competed, and none of us really knew what we were doing. My teammates and I spent hours after class sketching, experimenting, and researching—digging through old YouTube videos of VEX robots, reading forum posts, and borrowing scrap parts from the science lab. Every small success felt like a breakthrough.

Our entry that year was a robot built to navigate an obstacle course. It looked great on paper, but during the final competition, halfway through the course, the robot’s claw stopped responding. I could feel my heart sink. With no time to fix the code or rebuild, I grabbed the remote and steered it manually through the rest of the maze. Despite the mishap, we still placed second in the state.

Since then, I’ve explored everything from Python and data visualization to AI and machine learning. But I still think back to that first robot that refused to cooperate and how it taught me something far more important than winning: that perseverance and problem-solving are at the heart of innovation.

You can find many of the projects that grew from that spark in the dropdown for the My Work section.