My journey into this field has been a long one. As a young kid, I grew up in a household surrounded by technology, as my parents always had a passion for using technology to solve interesting problems. My dad studied software engineering so he could write software to answer the question of what makes athletes world class, and then he studied mathematics and statistics so he could analyze the data correctly. Our home was a unique laboratory where technology, sports analytics, art, and music collided daily. Growing up inside this environment with a mosaic of interests, with people around me excelling in each of them, my curiosity ran wild. I wanted to learn everything I could, about everything I could.
This childhood helped me develop passions and explore niches that I would otherwise never know existed. After growing up around groups of polymaths, elite athletes, scholars, artists, and having pursued many of these disciplines in high school, the thought of choosing a single career path always seemed so daunting to me. I could never envision myself narrowing down my field of knowledge to only one expertise! This uncertainty was so unnerving, and yet had to decide what I was going to pursue. I settled on technology as a field, because it envelops so much and there are so many facets involved: I get to be creative, but also logical, expressionist, yet rigid. The field of computer science is such a vast one, where you don’t have to narrow your focus. I can apply my creative mindset to solving complex problems, or designing graphics and then creating them as react components, like I did in a previous internship. I can solve real issues with technologies, and computer science is the field that backs up technology. There is no hardware without the software to tell it what to do.
Not a lot about the way we live currently is done without some form of technology. Technology is the broadest field of all, combining any and all other interests into one web, to connect the world in the sharing of knowledge, creating future solutions and environments, helping us as people, and as a society. This notion was especially evident in the years of COVID, and these years transformed my understanding of technology’s role in society. This is when I really decided on pursuing a future in technologies. This is also where I discovered the Creative Technologies degree, at the Auckland University of Technology, a conjoint degree combining core papers from Computer science, and the exploration of how design methodologies and creative practices can be applied to technological outcomes, to improve the world around us. Naturally, I dove head first into this. These past two years of learning have shaped me and my interests today, helping me to cultivate and explore my passions.
After diving into Creative Tech, and exploring the field outside of University, I pursued internships for the last year, working at an AI startup and then at Google. My Google mentor was the team lead at Area120 (the in-house incubator). Being exposed to these opportunities fills me with excitement for the future, as I want to pursue similar internships and jobs, working to improve the world, and accelerate technology to aid us as much as we can. In this past year, I have been drawn to the field of AI, neural networks, and machine learning, which is something that interests me beyond measure. I’ve always been interested in psychology and how the brain works, but in this field, instead of studying someone else’s brain, you are effectively creating and fine tuning a “brain” within a computer. I aim to deep dive into this field to increase both my knowledge and digital fluency, and contribute to such an interesting and fast paced discipline.
Pursuing software development has provided me with so much excitement, knowledge and experience, from when I was a kid, to my pursuits in university, to interning at Google, and now it has landed me halfway across the world, here at the University of Hawaii, studying computer science. I’m not just pursuing a degree — I’m positioning myself at the intersection of innovation and impact, ready to contribute to the next wave of technological advancement that will shape the world around us.