I didn't start with a grand vision about "changing the world." I started with a simpler, more honest question: why don't things work the way they should? A family member with a safety risk. A community resource that was impossible to navigate. A vehicle that couldn't make a simple navigation decision without a human driver. These are the kinds of problems I kept returning to.
My first real engineering project was messy. The code was fragile, the hardware misbehaved, and my initial assumptions about how sensors worked turned out to be wrong. But that failure taught me more than any tutorial could. I started to understand that building something is the fastest way to expose what you don't yet understand.
Over time, I developed a pattern: find a problem worth caring about, break it down into smaller questions, build something, see what breaks, and iterate. That pattern has driven everything I've worked on — from autonomous navigation to embedded safety systems to accessible web platforms.
I'm drawn to projects where the technology has to meet the physical world. Anyone can make software run in a controlled environment. The harder, more interesting problem is making it work on a desk, in a hallway, in the hands of a parent who's never touched a sensor before.
At university, I hope to go deeper — into machine learning, computer vision, and embedded systems — and keep asking the question I've always found most interesting: can this actually help someone?