I grew up in the wonderful state of Utah, among mountains and lakes that fostered my love of the outdoors. I competed in mountain biking and swimming in high school, and today, they are still hobbies I’m passionate about, along with hiking, coding, electronics. My upbringing was certainly unique compared to most of my peers; my family was one of the only families in our community that wasn’t white and Mormon. To offer some perspective, my high school of over 2500 students was over 90% white, and over 93% Mormon.
Although I had a great community growing up and value my friends back home, I yearned to experience diversity of backgrounds and experiences, and this ultimately pushed me to look out-of-state for college, although I do see the draw of the mountains bringing me back to Utah in the long run. One thing nobody seems to catch about me is I’m a really sentimental person. To be honest, I chose to apply early decision to Duke because I didn’t expect to make it in, but at least I could tell my parents I’d tried to apply to a “top” college before choosing a less selective university. Out of the top schools my parents wanted me to apply to, Duke was the only one that seemed remotely cool to me mostly because of its basketball program, so that’s where I sent my long-shot application that somehow ended up working out.
I love the experiences and opportunities I’ve had at Duke, as well as the meaningful connections and relationships I’ve made here, and am extremely grateful to be here. I’m majoring in electrical and computer engineering, with a minor in finance, and of course, the innovation and entrepreneurship certificate. I’ve always been interested in imagining, building, and designing solutions to problems, and studying engineering has always seemed like the logical path to do that as a career. I’d like to pivot into engineering project management, and in the long run, scaling my ideas into new business ventures to optimize efficiency of various processes around the world, and solve problem for a profit and a net benefit for society. Because of this desire, I’ve decided to pursue the certificate. I’m also interested in understanding financial markets and economics, which I feel will fit in nicely with the certificate.
In the long term, I’d like to work my way up from being an engineer to some kind of project management role, and ultimately starting my own company. I feel the coursework I have chosen in the certificate, which mainly revolves around the technology and design pathway, gives me the most background knowledge possible for these career goals as possible coming from my undergraduate experience.
I interned at a startup (300 hour experience) which develops tailored energy business workflow applications to large scale utilities, and there, I was given a lot of autonomy to build a project to allow “smart searching” of data while participating in discussions to maximize its business/client value vs cost, implement security constraints, and enable flexibility to adapt to different customer applications and use cases.
I currently work for a friend’s tutoring startup as the chief technology officer, where I cut costs for his website by over $250/month, integrated PayPal payments into an open source booking application to develop a tailored application that was much cheaper to use than licensing similar commercial software, and have used data to generate useful business insights.
This coming summer, I’ll be interning as a software developer at Amazon, and am excited to see how innovation works in a big corporate environment compared to the startup environment I’m used to. As mentioned before, my long term goal for my career is to solve problems for a profit and net benefit for society, and this is my mantra that drives my decisions in the short term to work towards that.