Computer Science and Innovation and Entrepreneurship
I met Alex Trebek in DC my freshman year of high school
I have a lot of interests I would say. I found them taking shape in many ways, like working as a harvester and vendor at a mushroom farm in Whites Creek, TN to volunteering as a science educator at my city’s Adventure Science Center. More recently, I have spent my time here at Duke iterating on a web app I created called Organic Connection that increases communities’ engagement with reducing food waste, to making an introductory online course on cloud computing during my time at Code+ over the summer, to now this year becoming a TA for the CS 201 class Data Structures and Algorithms and working in Duke’s AI health department to mitigate bias amongst the campus’s predictive medicine machine learning algorithms. In addition to working in STEM, I also love being in artistic spaces! I am a songwriter, musician, dancer, and poet. I was heavily involved last year with Duke’s street style dance group, StreetMed, and outside of there I was always writing poetry or songs in east campus music rooms. My first single, Rainbow, is out on all streaming platforms on August 31st actually, so feel free to check it out if you’d like :). Other places you may find me are with Duke’s campus ministry ENC or running and working out. In sum, I would say I have a big passion for holistic health. I want to help myself and others increase their quality of life in all aspects. This informs my goals to be a software developer and entrepreneur in the areas of health tech and finance. I want to be able to increase the efficacy of the growing preventative medicine field through the use of high performance computing and machine learning algorithms. I also want to create nonprofits and programs that allow for more equitable forms of growth and financial literacy among historically marginalized communities like my own. This same devotion to equity and representation is one of the reasons why I was drawn here, to SPIRE.
I feel like coming out of high school STEM was merely about learning the concepts and meeting standards, but having been in SPIRE for one year and meeting so many like-minded students and faculty, STEM feels more personal, tangible, and even more interesting.
