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Started the year by cold emailing and having conversations with a bunch of tech entrepreneurs. Learned about the startup world and started figuring out what I want to do with my career. As a bonus, a few of these emails eventually led to internship interviews for the summer!
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Competed in Hack@Brown 2025, my first hackathon. My three (randomly selected) teammates and I became fast friends, pulled an almost-all-nighter while we tried to figure out how Next.js works, and by the end built a website to help dementia patients recall their memories through photos. (As a sidenote, I also loved the hackathon's opening keynote by Cliff Weitzman. He's an inspiring speaker, and the talk is worth a watch for anyone thinking about making a big splash with tech.)
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Traveled to Greece and Italy with Paul during spring break. Highlight of the trip was realizing that the Colosseum tickets we had booked months ago included access to the "attic" level, where we were some of the only people on the entire floor while the rest of the Colosseum was packed.
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Organized a Brown EP day trip to Boston for students to meet startup founders. Talked with some entrepreneurs who continue to inspire my work to this day.
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Pulled an all-nighter to compose music for the Fermata 24-hour composition festival. (I actually composed for the festival twice this year: in April, I wrote for flute and clarinet, and in October I wrote for voice, English horn, and piano.)
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Organized Brown's first-ever AI startup conference with seven friends at school. We sold out our 300-person auditorium, raised $15k in sponsorships for the event, and brought in over 20 speakers from OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, Google, AWS, and a dozen startups. We did it all with just 3 months of planning.
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Took a few famous classes at Brown, including "Persuasive Communication" (TAPS 220) and "The Entrepreneurial Process" (ENGN 1010), in which my group of five ideated and pitched a hormone-safe perfume business from scratch.
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Finished up my tenure with Brown EP, the University Chorus, and as the CS Department's Head Sunlab Consultant. I had been a member of EP for a year, chorus for 2.5, and a consultant for 2.
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Moved to San Francisco for the summer to intern at Fresco. Learned a ton about coding with AI, the startup world in SF, and the construction industry. Beyond coding, I also donned boots and a hard hat multiple times throughout the summer and got to walk onto customers' active construction sites!
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While I was in SF and not working on my internship, I learned to roller skate, biked up many hills, celebrated my birthday, ate Fish in the Box at every possible opportunity, cold plunged in the ocean, ran into several people I knew from school, and made a bunch of memories.
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Moved back to Providence for my senior year of college (wow, three years have gone by so quickly).
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Started talking to one random stranger each day as a social experiment, and ended up making a bunch of friends in the process!
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Finally got around to exploring RISD's campus after 3+ years of being just up the hill at Brown. Turns out our artistic neighbors have some good things going for them, including cool buildings, a great dining hall, and some very cozy study spots.
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Played hide and seek across the greater Providence area bus network! The game was fun but had balance issues due to some edge-case rules that we forgot to clarify in advance, as well as RIPTA's low frequencies on most routes. We played again a month later in NYC using the subways, and the game was much more well-executed.
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Completed the Ratty Challenge the week before finals, by staying in Brown's main dining hall for almost 13 hours straight. Almost 50 friends sat with me at various points throughout the day!
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Two days later, I was on campus during the mass shooting at Brown. I'm still coming to grips with the fact that this happened. My friend Jun wrote a beautiful piece about how campus has changed in the aftermath.
The first few days back home for winter break were a little strange, but I am fortunate to be safe and well. Now, I'm writing this review from Colombia, where I'm on vacation with my extended family.
I plan to spend the first half of 2026 in Providence as I finish up university. After that, we'll see where life takes me!
This was inspired by Riley Walz, whose year-in-review posts I discovered a few weeks ago.