Looking Forward
Builder · Researcher · Storyteller
Almost everything on this site — the robots, the research, the papers, even the clubs I've co-headed — keeps circling back to one question: what does a new technology actually change, and who does it change it for? I want to keep asking that question in college, wherever it takes me — through an engineering lens at some schools, and through a more policy- and humanities-driven lens at others. They're not two different interests. They're the same question, studied from two directions — one that builds the system, one that studies what building it does to the people around it.
I'm one of a small minority of STEM-oriented students at Milton who elect difficult humanities electives — History of Modern China, Globalization & Islam — on top of an already-packed science and engineering course load. I didn't take them to check a box. Studying how the first railroads in China were used as tools of colonialism, or debating technology's ethical edge cases for three years in Philosophy Club, taught me that a strong historical lens sharpens my awareness of what engineering and scientific developments actually do once they leave the lab.
That's the instinct behind wanting the humanities and policy side of my education to carry just as much weight as the engineering side: I want the "why" of technology to stay load-bearing, not an elective on the side.
Whichever program I end up in, this is the part that doesn't change.
The reason I keep adding fields instead of narrowing down — robotics, research, history, philosophy, film — and the reason none of them have ever felt like a distraction from the others.
Three seasons of rebuilding a VEX robot from scratch, three iterations of a gbSTEM curriculum module, and a research project that only started working after the first few approaches didn't.
The reason "who does this affect, and how" is never a separate question from "does this work" — in a robot, a research rubric, or a housing policy from seventy years ago.
Every one of my proudest projects had other people inside it — ten teammates recruited to a robotics team built from scratch, a curriculum rebuilt three times over for gbSTEM's youngest learners, twice-weekly rehearsals with Milton's Jazz Band. I keep choosing to build things with people, not just for them.
A delegation to Japan, a Diwali stage I didn't expect to grow to love, three years mentoring my brother's FLL team — none of it shows up on a transcript, but all of it is why I want a campus where the classroom and the community are never really separate.
