Finding beauty in technology through its human side.

By far, my first year at this university is the most transformative one in my whole life.

I learned to model irrational human behavior using Kahneman's frameworks. I built optimization algorithms in Python and implemented epidemiological models from scratch. I studied how persuasion works at the neurological level — Social Judgment Theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cognitive Dissonance — and then applied it immediately in real advocacy work. I also learned scientific study design and did some cool projects on how historical racist housing policy affects current environmental inequality.

But the education that mattered most was not in a classroom. It was in the rotations across 4 continents — which is first San Francisco: empathizing with unhoused people in the Tenderloin, playing alongside neurodivergent teen artists at Creativity Explored, navigating a campus of 80+ nationalities where each small talk is a cultural and historical lesson, and every assumption about context or meaning had to be questioned.

Beyond that, I moved from being someone who avoided quantitative subjects to someone who truly enjoys the beauty of math and programming — and earned a 4.0 for my CS (FA) course. And that discovery is still ongoing, with my endless curiosity.