I woke up one day and realize that I'm not getting any younger. That is what catapulted me to start my own startup--a software development company. I'm pursuing my Master's at Rutgers University to complement my new venture and to help reduce the overwhelming high startup failure rate. The mood board I attached helps me with the ideation and design inspiration for branding my startup. What I learned in this life is to be ambitious in education, to see and capture the opportunities offered, but to also be humble to learn from others. The day that somebody stops learning about new methods, new languages, new tools, or otherwise is the day one starts failing. I am teachable, grateful, and thankful for what is given to me, and to those who have helped me in the journey to get there.

"Do you really need it, or will it be collecting dust in a year?" Thanks, dad!

Alexander the Great. He took enormous risks to achieve the highest position he could possibly attain. There might have been bigger kingdoms that lasted longer, but none of them overturned the world order in such a short time and for all time. All of western civilization is still working out ideas developed by the Greeks, and spread by Alexander and his army, throughout the Middle East, and northern India, and throughout Europe via Rome. Art, technology, science, mathematics, there is nothing in these fields that weren’t developed or enriched by Greek thought. He was his own greatest achievement. His conquest marked the end of the Persian empire and he was undefeated. He believed that nothing was impossible and the more impossible it was the more it needed to be achieved.

Access to large amounts of information with low ability to discern fact from fiction and truth from propaganda combined with a tribalistic world view. What's really scary is to see that in highly educated people who should know better. Critical thinking is a dying trait. I’m always asked what is the most trusted source of information. The truth is that no one should be relying on one or two outlets. Reading a variety of sources is a bit like taking regular exercise, it helps you develop skills to understand how complex news stories really are, and how no outlet will capture all the nuance. Watching MSNBC and then Fox covers the same story is an education in itself. Doing so makes you a more critical consumer of information, which is what we all need to be these days.

As the world continues to transform, the field of technology, more than any other today, is a catalyst for its change. Things that were once outside of our domain, we can now endeavor to bring to heel. The ability to sit down, twist some notion in your head into laws of logic, and then have it be obeyed in the real world is intensely gratifying for me. As the world continues to progress, more and more of it will become controllable by this craft. I look forward to the day when all of our programming skills let us control autonomous creations⎼the buildings we live in and the reality we see around us. It sounds outlandish, but the fields of AI, robotics, smart buildings, and AR are all racing towards those conclusions as I write this, and I am extremely excited about that. Programming has become a drug to me since my first day of learning it, and it’s an addiction I never want to break. This field will ultimately provide the ideal background I desire in order to shape my career in the tech industry. It will also make my dreams possible to start my own internet business and give back to the community. As I gain more experience, I want to be able to teach prisoners how to code so that when they are done serving their time, they will have a second chance in life, away from crime. Learning a skill as demanding as programming will help inmates avoid recidivism and create a better life for themselves and their families. Programming can also help them build confidence and discover that they can build things with determination and effort. I hope I could somehow spark inspiration with my knowledge and later on provide them with a second chance in life that they, too, deserve.

Nuclear Fusion. It offers the potential for nearly unlimited, clean energy that is not bound to geography, such as wind/solar. I'm personally invested in conducting research into Direct Energy Conversion (DEC), I believe that with DEC, fusion power has the ability to become the most common and powerful source of energy on this planet. The timescales have always been hard to predict, but, in my opinion, reactor configurations that operate in a pulsed power with plasma inductive coupling have the potential to completely reshape how we think about nuclear energy. Experiments conducted back in the '70s to '80s with pinch and solenoid confinement showed an energy efficiency of close to 70% with the theoretical maximum of induction being close to 85-90%. Reactor configurations like these would no longer need turbines, generators, cooling towers, and all of the associated infrastructure. This would have a massive advantage over pretty much all forms of power especially as plasma physics advances allow smaller reactor designs.

When I first started coding, I was extremely surprised that there is a lot of room for creativity. I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect along with the freedom that came with it. The sublime feeling of working a blank canvas into something not only functional but beautiful as well. As the world continues to transform, this field, more than any other today, is a catalyst for its change. Things that were once outside of our domain, we can now endeavor to bring to heel. The ability to sit down, twist some notion in your head into laws of logic, and then have it be obeyed in the real world is intensely gratifying for me. As the world continues to progress, more and more of it will become controllable by this craft. I look forward to the day when all of our programming skills let us control autonomous creations⎼the buildings we live in and the reality we see around us. It sounds outlandish, but the fields of AI, robotics, smart buildings, and AR are all racing towards those conclusions as I write this, and I am extremely excited about that. Programming has become a drug to me since my first day of learning it, and it’s an addiction I never want to break. The Nervo "Revolution" Scholarship will provide me a significant financial contribution to shape my career in the tech industry. It will also make my dreams possible to start my own internet business and give back to the community. As I gain more experience, I want to be able to teach prisoners how to code so that when they are done serving their time, they will have a second chance in life, away from crime. Learning a skill as demanding as programming will help inmates avoid recidivism and create a better life for themselves and their families. Programming can also help them build confidence and discover that they can build things with determination and effort. I hope I could somehow spark inspiration with my knowledge and later on provide them with a second chance in life that they, too, deserve.