Aspirations

I believe the most important problems are structural. Not 'how do we help this student today' but 'how do we design the system so that 10,000 students get better outcomes automatically.' That's why I'm building institutions alongside products — Starling Industries isn't a company, it's a long-term commitment to a particular approach to building things that matter.

In five years, I want Forge Academy to be a real product with real users — not a prototype, not a demo, something that students actually depend on to get better at what they're trying to learn. I want Academia Digital to have a curriculum that teachers across Latin America are running without any involvement from me — the mark of something built correctly is that it doesn't require its founder to keep it alive. And I want LINCOLNMUN to be the kind of conference that produces future founders and diplomats who remember it as the place they learned to think under pressure.

Longer term: I want to do research at the frontier of AI and education — not applied research that optimizes existing systems, but work that changes the question being asked. And I want Starling Industries to be the institutional structure through which that research produces real things in the world, not just papers. A holding company is how you build a portfolio of bets. I'm 17, which means I have time to make a lot of bets.

The reason I'm applying to MIT and CMU isn't just for the credential. It's because the people I want to think alongside, the resources I want access to, and the problems I want to work on are concentrated in those environments. I don't plan to stay in academia permanently — but I plan to use it correctly.