I did not grow up with a mentor in technology. I grew up with curiosity, and I had to figure out the rest myself. As a first generation Indian immigrant on a dependent visa in Schaumburg, Illinois, the path into tech was never laid out for me. There was no older cousin who worked at Google, no family friend who could make an introduction, no roadmap for how someone like me breaks into an industry built by people who do not always look like me or share my story. What I had was a relentless need to understand how things worked, a laptop, and the willingness to be told no until someone said yes. That willingness took me further than I ever expected. At fifteen, I cold-emailed the CEO of Weav.ai, an AI startup in Silicon Valley, and asked for an internship. He said yes. I spent that summer as the youngest person on the team, building AI tools that unified internal communications and sitting in on engineering meetings where I absorbed everything I could. I earned my Microsoft Azure AZ-900 certification that same year, teaching myself cloud architecture, virtualization, and network security through labs and practice exams after school. The following summer I interned at Sixfold AI in New York City, where I built an MCP pipeline connecting AI systems to Slack, Gmail, and Microsoft Teams, and developed a synthetic data tool that generated thousands of insurance test cases, helping the company win enterprise clients like Zurich. None of these opportunities came to me. I went and found them, because I had learned early that no one was coming to open the door for me. Outside of internships, I have been president of my school's robotics club for all four years of high school, leading a team of fifty plus members, securing a four thousand dollar annual grant from Bosch, and designing every robot we competed with on Autodesk Inventor. We placed third out of fifty eight teams at the D214 Robot Rumble. I also hold four Bloomberg certifications in Market Concepts, Finance Fundamentals, ESG, and Spreadsheet Analysis, which deepened my understanding of how technology intersects with business and finance. What draws me to technology is not just the technical challenge. It is the leverage it gives ordinary people to do extraordinary things. I have seen firsthand how AI tools can transform entire industries. I have built systems that real companies use in the real world. And I know that the gap between where I started and where I have gotten is not because I was exceptional. It is because I was stubborn enough to keep showing up. That is exactly why scholarships like this one matter. The students who are missing from the technology industry are not missing because they lack talent. They are missing because they lack access. I am one of those students, and I am proof that given the chance, we show up and we deliver. This scholarship would help ensure that my education is not cut short by financial barriers, and that the drive I have carried this far gets to go the distance.

I watched Weathering With You for the first time alone, on a quiet night when the house was still and my parents were asleep. I did not expect it to change something in me. It did. The film follows Hodaka, a teenage boy who runs away to Tokyo with nothing but a little money and a lot of desperation. The city swallows him whole at first. He sleeps in internet cafes, gets turned away from job after job, and wanders streets full of people who do not notice him. He says it over and over, almost like a mantra he is trying to convince himself of: "Tokyo sure is scary." I knew that feeling before I had words for it. I am the son of Indian immigrants who built a life in a country that was not theirs, in a language that did not come naturally, surrounded by people who did not always understand them. I grew up watching my parents navigate that quiet loneliness with a dignity I did not fully appreciate until I was older. And when I started stepping into bigger rooms myself, cold-emailing executives in Silicon Valley, interning in New York City at sixteen, walking into offices where I was the youngest and most out of place person in the building, I felt it too. The smallness. The uncertainty. The voice in the back of my head saying I do not belong here. But Hodaka does not stay scared. Slowly, without announcing it, Tokyo stops being something that happens to him and starts being something he builds. He finds people. He finds purpose. He finds a life that is genuinely his own. And somewhere in the middle of the film, almost without you noticing, the mantra shifts. "Tokyo sure is great." That quiet transformation is the most honest thing I have ever seen in a movie. Not a dramatic turning point, not a single moment of triumph, just the gradual realization that belonging is not something a place gives you. It is something you build, through showing up, through connecting, through choosing to stay even when it is hard. I carry that with me. Every time I have walked into a room that felt too big for me, every time I have doubted whether I had any business being there, I think about Hodaka wandering those Tokyo streets and deciding, quietly and stubbornly, to make them his own. That is the kind of person I want to be. Not someone who waits to feel ready, but someone who shows up anyway and builds something worth staying for. Weathering With You did not just move me. It gave me a framework for my own life. The city is scary until it is not. The room is intimidating until you fill it. And the life you are building, however uncertain it looks from the outside, is yours to make extraordinary.

I have spent most of my life as an only child, but I never quite felt like one. From as early as I can remember, I was aware of a quiet ache in our home. Not loud, not dramatic, just present. The kind of thing a child picks up in the silences between conversations, in the way my mother winced at certain topics, in the extra bedroom that stayed empty for years. My parents wanted more children. What followed was one of the most painful chapters of my family's life, and one I watched helplessly from the sidelines. For years, my mother went through round after round of IVF. Countless injections, countless appointments, countless trips back to India where treatment was more affordable but no less grueling. I watched her endure it all with a grace I did not fully understand at the time. She never complained in front of me. But I saw the exhaustion in her eyes after long flights, the quiet disappointment she tried to hide, the way hope and heartbreak took turns living in our house. My father carried it too, steadily and silently, the way he carries everything. Then came the pregnancy that felt different. For a brief, beautiful stretch of time, our home felt lighter. There was a future being planned, a name being considered, a sibling I had already started loving before they ever arrived. And then, in the second trimester, we lost them. I was not prepared for what grief like that feels like when it belongs to your whole family. I cried for weeks. Not just for the sibling I would not get to know, but for my mother, who had fought so hard and given so much of herself. I did not know how to help. I did not know what to say. I just sat with it, and it sat with me. What that season taught me is something I carry into everything I do. That the people who love you will endure things you cannot imagine on your behalf, quietly and without asking for recognition. And that the only worthy response to that kind of love is to live with intention, to work hard, to show up fully, and to make the sacrifices mean something. Then came Sehar. My little sister arrived into this world after everything our family had been through, and I have never felt anything quite like the first time I held her. She is thirteen years younger than me, which means I will be leaving for college just as she is beginning to understand the world. That gap used to feel strange to me. Now it feels like a responsibility I am grateful for. I will not always be down the hall, but I will always be her brother, and I intend to be the kind of brother who shows her what is possible. I am a first generation Indian immigrant, the son of two people who left everything familiar to build something better. I have cold-emailed my way into Silicon Valley internships, built a business with my family, led teams, failed publicly, and come back stronger each time. But none of my achievements mean as much to me as the values underneath them: the determination I learned watching my mother endure the unendurable, the faithfulness I learned watching my father never waver, and the love I feel every time I look at my sister and think about the long road it took to bring her here. Sehar will grow up not fully remembering a time before she existed, the way none of us do. But I will remember. I will remember every empty year, every quiet heartbreak, every moment our family held on anyway. And when she is old enough to ask me what kind of person she should be, I want to be able to point to my own life as an answer. I want her to see someone who worked hard, who gave back, who chose to live with intention even when it was difficult. She is thirteen years younger than me, but she is already the clearest reason I have to become someone worth looking up to.

Exploding my toilet for the first time had nothing to do with Taco Bell. We learned about the reactivity of alkali metals in chemistry class. The reaction resulted in a broken beaker and a curiosity I couldn't put back. At home, I realized batteries contain lithium. I took one apart, emptied it into my family's toilet, and watched it react violently, filling the bathroom with smoke and shattering the porcelain. Curiosity might kill the cat, but it most definitely harms plumbing. That moment captured something true about who I am: I have never been able to take anything at surface value. I am always the person who needs to know what is underneath. That same instinct led me to Akinator when I was ten. A genie on Google who could read my mind with a handful of yes or no questions. I played it obsessively, not because I enjoyed the game, but because I couldn't stop wondering how it worked. When I finally figured out it was a decision tree built on millions of human responses, something clicked. The magic didn't disappear. It deepened. Because I realized that behind every seemingly impossible thing is a logic someone built, and that someone could be me. That realization set everything in motion. I threw myself into AP Computer Science Principles, then AP CS A, learning to move a ball across a screen with a dog named Karel before working my way up to Java, machine learning, and cloud architecture. But classroom walls felt too small. I wanted to apply what I was learning in the real world, so sophomore year I cold-emailed my way into an AI internship at Weav.ai in Silicon Valley, becoming the youngest person on the team. The following summer I built machine learning pipelines at Sixfold AI in New York City. I wasn't waiting for someone to hand me an opportunity. I went and found it. Now I want to take those skills further. I plan to study computer science at the University of Maryland, a top twenty school for CS, where an AI major will be available by 2027. Situated between Washington DC and New York City, two of the most innovative cities in the world, it is exactly the environment I need to be at the forefront of what comes next in this field. Arthur Walasek started with an Apple computer and never stopped learning. I started with a shattered toilet and a ten year old's obsession with a mind-reading game. The details are different, but the drive is the same. I want to spend my life building things that make people stop and wonder how they work, and then showing them that they can build it too.