Pittsburgh Future Founders Scholarship

To dream, soar, crash and rise again. Entrepreneurship embodies the idea that I can dream something and then actually build it into reality. To me there is something incredible about the thought of leading a company from the ground up and watching an idea I once held in my head become real. But the longer I've spent in college, the more I've realized that the dream itself isn't the only thing that drives me. What truly excites me is the people. Learning how to train and raise up teammates, guiding them through obstacles, and coming out the other side successful together has been one of the most rewarding feelings I've found. It's what makes me want to take on hard challenges and push against the status quo instead of settling into it. Entrepreneurship, to me, is a discipline that forces me to question everything. It doesn't let me accept that things have to be the way they are, and in doing so it makes me stronger, sharper, and more resilient. Utilizing this mindset is exactly why I chose to pursue it as an additional major in Entrepreneurship, Design, and Innovation alongside my Electrical and Computer Engineering degree at Carnegie Mellon University. My background isn't one of wealth, and I've worked part-time every summer to grow my experience and to help pay for school. That reality shaped my ambition of not wanting to build successful companies, I want to build systems and designs that are accessible to everyone, not only to the people who can afford them. I've tried to prioritize entrepreneurship throughout college by approaching it from every angle I could. I've interned at venture capital firms to understand how investors evaluate companies and how that perspective differs from the experience of actually founding a startup myself. I've attended the McGinnis Venture Competition to watch how real founders think, pitch, and carry their projects forward, learning from the way they handle pressure and uncertainty. I've gone to make-a-thons and hack-a-thons to practice generating and prototyping ideas that could one day become startups of my own. Each of these experiences taught me something different, and together they've given me a fuller picture of what it actually takes to bring a venture to life. What I love about entrepreneurship is that its limits are endless. There's always another problem to solve, another person to learn from, another idea to chase. Pursuing it has helped me grow and connect with people on a scale that I don't think a traditional engineering path alone would have offered me. Engineering taught me how to build; entrepreneurship taught me why it matters and who it's for. Combining the two is how I want to spend my career, creating technology that genuinely helps people while lifting up the teams and communities around me. That is the climb I've committed to, and every competition, internship, and late night spent learning and building towards a dream has been worth it.