I am a senior in high school and grew up in Baltimore, after being adopted into a family in Boston. In third grade, I tested into the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, where coursework in mathematics and computer science gave me an early introduction to programming. Since the beginning of high school, I have put that to use doing programming for an economics research lab at Columbia, learning economics and falling in love with the subject along the way.
In my freshman year, I began helping people in Baltimore find jobs. There were people looking for work and employers looking for people, but the two did not always find each other. We began building relationships with employers and brought job openings, introductions, and application help into libraries and community spaces. What started informally became a formal project, expanded to other cities, and grew to include an online fellowship program. Through our Opportunities Project, we have connected people to more than 9,000 first-job opportunities.
Outside of this, I enjoy speedcubing, though I spend more time coming up with algorithms than getting faster; I average around thirty seconds. I read philosophy, including Baudrillard, Spinoza, Aristotle, Marx, Žižek, and Rand, and enjoy languages and Renaissance art. I also play the piano, mostly Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, and Ravel, in roughly descending order of how well I play them.