I do not wait
for the right time.

Technology found me early — not through a class or a parent who coded. In Grade 6 I was introduced to Scratch during an online summer camp, and loved the idea of turning an idea into something that worked. Robotics was a regular school activity from Grade 2 — the earliest version of a question I still find compelling: how do you make a machine do something it couldn't do before? That question has two answers. One is software. The other is hardware. Computer Engineering is the discipline that refuses to choose between them. By Grade 7 I joined Helios Tech Club and started exploring programming seriously — not because it was required, but because I wanted to understand how software and the systems underneath it actually work together. By Grade 8 I had built a Discord community for hardware enthusiasts (raided twice, rebuilt three times — now 300+ members). By Grade 10 I was running a battery recycling initiative and speaking about it to a full school auditorium. By Grade 11 I had three internships, a cybersecurity tool, a design agency with paying clients, and a drone I built from scratch that placed 3rd in a school competition. Nobody assigned any of it.

I sit at the intersection of hardware, software, sustainability, and entrepreneurship — not because it sounds good on paper, but because these are the things I cannot stop thinking about. Battery Bin is environmental. PhishSentinel is technical. BrandSnap is entrepreneurial. Hardware Decoded is a community built around understanding how computing systems actually work. My NAS is infrastructure I run myself. The thread connecting all of them: I saw something worth building and built it.

Outside the projects: I have played Indian classical flute since Grade 3 — over a decade, uninterrupted, with a school award in Grade 9. I have won gold medals in skating and chess. I taught myself chess seriously during COVID in Grade 7 — Lichess and Chess.com daily for five months, beat my father for the first time, became the chess person of the grade, won two gold medals representing school. I run a personal NAS and maintain a digital library at home because I want to understand infrastructure by actually running it. I have completed Harvard CS50 and The Complete JavaScript Course. I do not start things to have started them.

What drives me

I want to understand computing from the ground up — not just what software does, but how the hardware underneath it is designed, and how software and hardware are made to work together. That question has been running through everything else on this website. I built a NAS not just to store files, but because I wanted to understand how storage and networking actually behave when you are responsible for making them work. I built and raced a drone because flight controllers, ESC firmware, and PID loops are places where software has to answer directly to physics — there is no abstraction layer between the code and the consequence. Hardware Decoded exists because I wanted a community that cared about the same question: what is actually happening inside the machine, and why does it matter?

That is why I am applying to Computer Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Not as a departure from the software and systems work I have already done — but as the next step in the same direction I have always been moving: from the application layer downward, toward the hardware-software boundary where the most interesting engineering happens.