I did not choose computer science. A problem chose me. A family friend who ran a small business paid a vendor she found online, transferred the money, and watched them disappear. No system existed to verify who she was dealing with before the payment left her account. The infrastructure that could have protected her had been built for large corporations and never extended to people like her. I could not fix what already happened. But I could not stop thinking about how many other small business owners were sitting in the same gap right now, exposed and unprotected. That is what pulled me into computer science. Not a class or a career fair. A problem that made me angry enough to do something about it. The adversities along the way have been real. I left Nigeria at seventeen with no family in the United States and a multi-million Naira loan as my only foundation. As an international student I did not qualify for federal financial aid, which meant every loan I carried came at a higher interest rate than most of my peers. There were semesters where I could not pay rent. Moments where I was close to losing my enrollment entirely. I navigated all of it not because the path was clear but because going back was never something I was willing to consider. What kept me moving was building. I taught myself to implement two AI research papers I barely understood, which became a patent pending multi-agent AI system I have presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. I built Tatin, a payment identity platform, as a direct answer to what happened to my family friend, replacing insecure bank detail sharing with verified business identities so small businesses can confirm who they are paying before money changes hands. I earned a Software Engineer internship at Google and then earned it again for a second summer. None of this came with a map. It came from refusing to let not knowing how be a reason not to start. The impact I hope to make through STEM goes beyond any single product. I want to build technology that reaches the people most often left out of the systems built to protect everyone else. The small business owner with no fraud protection. The student in a country where access to opportunity is limited by geography and circumstance. The community that has never been considered the default user of the technology being built around them. I am also already working to open the doors behind me. I organized six students at my former university to raise over ten thousand dollars and attend the National Society of Black Engineers conference when the institution provided nothing. That effort became a permanent scholarship. I brought the Black Venture Capital Consortium to my current campus, holding free sessions for over thirty students in software development and entrepreneurship. STEM is not a career to me. It is the most powerful tool I have found for closing gaps that should not exist. I intend to use it for exactly that.

I did not grow up in North Nashville. But I chose to be here, and staying here has taught me more than I expected. I came to the United States from Nigeria at seventeen with no family and no safety net, and I found my way to Fisk University in the 37208 zip code. What I found when I arrived was not just a campus but a community with real history, real pride, and real pain. Jefferson Street told me everything I needed to know about what this neighborhood has built and what it has been forced to carry. I started showing up, not because anyone asked me to, but because I recognized something here that I understood from home: people with enormous talent and limited access, communities that have been overlooked for generations by the systems that were supposed to serve them. I got involved with the NAACP chapter here and worked with the Boys and Girls Club and other nonprofits in the area. That work grounded me in a way that my coursework alone never could. I learned that the problems facing this community are not problems of potential. They are problems of access, infrastructure, and trust. I am a Computer Science student and I am building a career at the intersection of AI and financial technology. I know that might sound distant from the needs of North Nashville. But it is not. The same community on Jefferson Street that produced generations of Black business owners is still full of people trying to build, to grow, and to protect what they have earned. The tools that protect large corporations from fraud, verify vendors, and secure financial transactions have never been built for them. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she could not verify. That problem is not unique to her. It is everywhere in communities like this one, where small business owners operate without the legal and financial infrastructure that larger enterprises take for granted. My plan for Nashville is not abstract. I want to bring the technology I am building into direct contact with the community I live in. That means working with small business owners on Jefferson Street to help them protect their payments and verify their vendors. It means using my network from Google, from Greylock Techfair, and from the AI community to connect North Nashville entrepreneurs with the tools and opportunities that have historically been out of reach. And it means continuing to show up the same way I have been showing up, in the NAACP, in the nonprofits, in the spaces where technology and community actually meet. Joe D. Martin Jr. could not attend college despite everything he had going for him. I think about that because I know how close I have come to the same outcome, and I know how much it took to stay. This scholarship would help me finish what I started and stay rooted in the community that has given me so much while I was still figuring out how to give back.

My plan has two tracks running in parallel and they both start this December. Track one is my career. I graduate from Fisk University in December 2026 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a GPA of 3.79. I am currently completing my second Software Engineer internship at Google, building agentic AI workflows using Gemini and Chrome MCP tools. After graduation I will transition immediately into a full-time software engineering role through my STEM OPT authorization, which gives me three years of work authorization in the United States through approximately late 2029. My target salary range for a new graduate software engineer role is $130,000 to $160,000 based on current market data for AI-focused engineering roles in San Francisco and New York, which are my two primary target markets. I have active conversations with companies from Greylock Techfair, which I was accepted to attend on July 16, 2026, and my goal is to have a full-time offer signed before I graduate in December. Track two is my startup. I founded Tatin after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify before sending money. The infrastructure that could have protected her existed for large corporations but had never been made accessible to small business owners like her. The long-term goal is not simply to build a profitable company but to make business identity verification affordable and accessible for small organizations that currently operate without the protections available to larger firms. Every small business that uses Tatin is one fewer business exposed to the kind of fraud that cost my family friend everything she sent. The MVP is fully built and deployed. The immediate roadmap for the next twelve months is to acquire the first ten paying small business customers at $49 per month per customer, generating approximately $5,880 in annual recurring revenue as a starting point. I am building Tatin on the side of my full-time role, which is the standard path for early-stage founders before reaching the revenue threshold that justifies going full-time. My target for full-time transition is $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which I project as an eighteen to twenty-four month timeline from launch. The financial picture is straightforward. I carry approximately $80,000 in private student loan debt at interest rates between 10 and 14 percent because as an international student I did not qualify for federal loans. Monthly payments after graduation will be approximately $900 to $1,100. I am also the primary financial support for my family in Nigeria, adding approximately $300 to $400 per month in obligations. On a $130,000 salary, my monthly take-home after taxes is approximately $7,200, leaving room to cover loan payments; family support; living expenses estimated at $2,500 to $3,000 per month in a major city; and reinvestment into Tatin's early growth. What I need most right now is the space to finish my final semester without the financial pressure of a tuition balance pulling focus away from the job search and the startup work happening simultaneously. This scholarship directly reduces that pressure. Every dollar I do not have to find elsewhere is time I get back to execute the plan. Joe Gilroy kept his to-do list in his shirt pocket every single day. I keep mine in a Notion database I review every morning. The system is different. The discipline is the same.

There is a woman named Mrs. Ashanique Moore who I met through family long before I knew how much she would change my life. She is an accountant by profession, the kind of person who can look at a broken financial situation and see a way through it rather than just sympathizing with it. When I came to the United States at seventeen from Nigeria with no family here and a multi-million naira loan as my only foundation, she became the person I called when the path ran out. There was a period where I could not pay rent and could not cover tuition and was on the verge of losing my enrollment entirely. I had nowhere to turn. Mrs. Moore loaned me the money to stay in school and then sat with me and told me plainly that where I was would keep me stuck and that I needed to transfer somewhere that could actually support me. That conversation is the reason I am at Fisk University today. She did not have to do any of that. She did it because she believed in what I could become before I fully believed it myself. That is the kind of impact I want to spend my career creating for other people. My vision is to use my education in computer science and AI to build technology that protects the people most often left out of the systems built to protect everyone else. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify before sending money. The infrastructure that could have protected her existed for large corporations but had never been made accessible to small business owners like her. I want to close that gap. I am currently building agentic AI systems at Google, and I am building toward a career as a technical founder who creates tools that serve the people at the edges of the economy, not just the center. But the change I am most determined to create is the same one Mrs. Moore created for me. Someone who shows up for people before they have earned it. Someone who invests in potential rather than proof. I do this now through mentorship, through bringing the Black Venture Capital Consortium to Fisk's campus so that students have access to networks they would otherwise never reach, and through organizing students at my former university to raise over ten thousand dollars to attend the National Society of Black Engineers conference when the institution provided nothing. Every one of those efforts is me trying to be for someone else what Mrs. Moore was for me. Sloane Stephens built this scholarship in honor of the people who shaped her before the world knew her name. I understand that impulse completely. The people who give before you have anything to give back are the foundation everything else is built on. Mrs. Moore gave me that foundation. Everything I am building is an attempt to honor it.

Being a first-generation student means writing the manual as you go, with no one ahead of you to call back directions. I left Nigeria at seventeen with a multi-million naira loan, no family in the United States, and no blueprint for any of what came next. Nobody in my family had attended college before me. Nobody could explain what financial aid looked like, how to ask for help without feeling like you did not belong, or what to do when the system assumed you already knew the rules. I learned every step alone, usually by getting it wrong before getting it right. The hardest moments were not academic. They were the semesters where I could not pay rent. The moments where I was close to losing my enrollment entirely because I could not cover tuition. The nights where I sat with the math over and over trying to find a version that worked, and there was no version that worked. I navigated all of it because the people who believed in me enough to let me leave were counting on me to make it worth it. I could not go back. That was never an option. What kept me moving was building things I did not yet know how to build. I taught myself to implement two AI research papers I barely understood, which became a patent-pending multi-agent AI system I have presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. I built Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify. I earned a software engineer internship at Google and then earned it again for a second summer. Each of those things happened not because the path was clear but because I refused to let the absence of a path be a reason to stop. My dream is to become a technical founder building AI infrastructure and financial technology for the people most often left out of the systems built to protect everyone else. The small business owner with no fraud protection. The student from a country where access is limited by circumstance and geography. I want to build the tools that close those gaps, and I want to do it as someone who has lived on the wrong side of them. This scholarship would give me the space to finish my final semester focused entirely on that work. Not split between surviving and building. Not choosing between the loan payment and the application deadline. Just finishing what I started so I can step into everything I came here to do. Being first-generation means you carry more than most people see. It also means that when you make it, you bring something back that nobody in your family has ever held before. I intend to make it, and I intend to make it matter.

I remember the exact moment technology stopped being a career path and became something more urgent. A family friend who ran a small business paid a vendor she found online, transferred the money, and watched them disappear. The tools that would have let her verify who she was dealing with before sending payment simply did not exist for someone in her position. I could not fix what already happened. But I could not stop thinking about how many other small business owners were sitting in the same gap right now, exposed by systems that had never been built with them in mind. That problem is what pulled me into computer science. Not a class or a career fair. A problem that made me angry enough to do something about it. The challenge was that nobody handed me a path to get there. I left Nigeria at seventeen with no family in the United States and a multi-million naira loan as my only foundation. I figured it out by building things I did not yet know how to build. I taught myself to implement two AI research papers I barely understood, which became a patent-pending multi-agent AI system presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. I built Tatin, a payment identity platform, as a direct answer to what happened to my family friend. I earned a software engineer internship at Google and then earned it again for a second summer. Each project taught me that technical skill matters most when it is directed toward problems people cannot afford to ignore. That same instinct spilled into the community work I am most proud of. At my former university I noticed that students who looked like me had no awareness of professional opportunities in tech. I organized six students, raised over ten thousand dollars through outreach to the provost office, the DEI office, and community fundraisers, and sent us to the National Society of Black Engineers conference with no institutional backing. The DEI office later created a permanent sponsorship because of what we started. I also brought the Black Venture Capital Consortium to my current campus, holding free sessions for over thirty students in software development, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. I learned that opening one door matters, but building the influence and resources to keep it open changes an institution. My Computer Science degree is what makes the technical side of that mission possible. The coursework in algorithms, data structures, database management, networks, and software architecture gives me the foundation to build systems that are not just functional but secure and scalable. Without that depth, the problems I care about stay unsolvable. After graduation I am focused on building deliberately, growing my skills, my network, and my financial foundation while continuing to give back through communities like ColorStack and the mentorship work I am already doing. The bigger infrastructure I want to build someday requires resources and reach I am still working toward. I am not skipping that step. I am in my final semester now. Completing this degree means I can enter software engineering equipped to build secure financial technology and AI systems for the people most often left out of the systems that protect everyone else. The small business owner with no fraud protection. The student with no pathway into tech. This scholarship gives me the space to finish that degree focused entirely on the work and to step into everything that comes next.

Nobody asked me to build a live execution graph. It was not in any spec or roadmap. I built it because I was frustrated and I had an idea, and that combination has always been enough to get me started. I was six months into building the Recursive Agent Framework, a multi-agent AI system where one group of agents proposes solutions and a completely separate group evaluates them. The system was running. Tasks were being decomposed, agents were voting, and outputs were being produced. But I had no idea what was actually happening inside it. I would start a run, wait, and get a result with no visibility into why it made the decisions it made. Was the decomposition good? Did the jury agree? Did something fail silently in the middle? So I built a D3.js force-directed graph that updates in real time as the system runs. Every agent task becomes a node. Every dependency becomes an edge. Nodes light up as agents start working. Votes appear as the jury evaluates proposals. Failures flash red before the system retries. You can click any node and see its goal, the proposals generated, the votes cast, the final output, and any errors that occurred along the way. When I showed it to people for the first time, the reaction surprised me. I had built it as a debugging tool for myself. But what they saw was something different. They saw an AI system thinking in real time. They could watch a complex task get broken into pieces, watch agents disagree and vote and reach a conclusion, and watch the system catch an error and fix it without human intervention. Something that had been invisible became visible. Something that had felt like a black box became something you could actually understand. A professor at Vanderbilt, who I had been corresponding with about the research behind RAF, told me the graph alone changed how he thought about multi-agent system design. Not because it was technically novel, D3 force graphs exist, and people build visualizations all the time but because of what it revealed. When you can actually see how a system makes decisions, you start noticing things about the decisions themselves that you would never catch by reading logs. That is what I love most about tinkering. The thing you build for yourself often ends up being the thing that helps someone else see something differently. I built the graph to debug my own system. It ended up becoming the most talked-about feature of the project, the thing people point at when they want to explain what RAF actually does. Kyle Lam's hacker spirit, building something new because a problem bothered you and a solution seemed possible, is exactly the spirit that produced that graph. It was never about whether it could be done. It was about figuring out how to make the invisible visible and then seeing the look on someone's face when they watched an AI system think for the very first time.

Community is not something I found when I arrived in the United States. It is something I had to build. When I transferred to Whitworth University, a predominantly white institution in Spokane, Washington, I noticed something that bothered me immediately. There were no pathways being presented to students who looked like me. No awareness of professional opportunities, no networks, no one pointing us toward anything. I decided not to wait for the institution to fix that. I discovered that opportunities like the National Society of Black Engineers conference existed and decided we were going. When I found out there was no funding, I gathered five other students and built it from scratch. We reached out to the provost office, the DEI office, the NAACP, and individual professors. We organized car washes and fundraising events on weekends. When professors pushed back because the trip conflicted with midterms, I kept going until the provost personally signed off. We raised over ten thousand dollars with no institutional backing and no precedent to follow. The DEI office later created a permanent sponsorship because of what we started, so future students would not have to fight that battle from zero. That experience shaped how I think about community. It taught me that the most important thing is not waiting for someone else to build the path. It is building it yourself and making sure it stays there for the person behind you. I carried that instinct to Fisk University when I transferred. I lead the Black Student Union, where I serve as the primary bridge between students of color and university administration, organizing events and creating spaces where students feel seen and supported. I also helped bring the Black Venture Capital Consortium to Fisk's campus, going directly to the Honors College director, the computer science department head, and business professors to get it institutionalized. We held sessions for over thirty students in software development, entrepreneurship, and venture capital, giving them access to knowledge and networks they would not have had otherwise, completely free. Beyond campus I volunteer as a mentor for students preparing for careers in technology, helping them navigate technical interviews, resumes, and the unwritten rules of breaking into an industry that has not always made space for them. I do this because I know what it costs to figure those things out alone, and I want to reduce that cost for the next person. The common thread across all of it is simple. Every community I have been part of, I have tried to leave better than I found it, not through grand gestures, but through showing up consistently and building the things that were missing.

I did not grow up with access to computers or coding classes. What pulled me into computer science was not a class or a teacher but a problem I could not stop thinking about. AI models are getting more capable every year, but give one a complex task, and it drifts, loses context, and produces answers that sound right but are not. I read two research papers on this problem, did not fully understand them, and decided to build what they described. Six months later, I had the Recursive Agent Framework, a multi-agent AI system now patent pending and presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. That project is what confirmed it for me. Computer science was the only field where the distance between not knowing something and understanding it completely was determined by how willing I was to sit with the difficulty long enough to figure it out. I found that I was very willing. My dream is to become a technical founder building AI infrastructure that reaches the people most often left out of the systems everyone else takes for granted. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify. I am currently a Software Engineer Intern at Google for my second summer, building AI tools that help engineers find and fix software errors before they reach real users. Everything I am building points in the same direction: technology that protects and empowers the people who have historically been overlooked by it. I believe I am the best candidate for this scholarship because I understand, in a very real way, what Chris Jackson understood. That education is worth fighting for even when the financial reality makes it genuinely hard. I left Nigeria at seventeen with a loan I am still paying down, no family in this country, and a belief that getting this degree would change the trajectory of my life and everyone I planned to bring with me. I have been the breadwinner for my family back home while carrying high-interest private loans through every semester. I am in my final semester now, closer to the finish line than I have ever been, and the pressure is still real. What keeps me going is the same thing that kept Chris going. The belief that the degree is worth it. That the work matters. That finishing what you started, no matter how hard the path, is how you actually change things. This scholarship would give me the space to finish strong rather than spending my final semester chasing every dollar. That is all I am asking for. The chance to focus on what I came here to do.

Six months ago I read two research papers I barely understood and made a decision that changed everything that came after. I was going to build what they described, even though I had never done anything like it before. The problem that started it all was simple but stubborn. AI models are powerful, but give one a long, complex task and it drifts, loses context, and produces answers that sound right but are not. The papers I read were trying to solve this in different ways. One showed that breaking tasks into smaller recursive pieces could help models handle things far beyond their normal limits. The other showed that using one group of agents to propose solutions and a completely separate group to evaluate them could dramatically reduce errors. I wanted to know if both ideas could work together. So I started building. What came out of those months is the Recursive Agent Framework. The idea behind it is something most people understand intuitively even without a technical background. A team of people checking each other's work almost always produces better results than one person working alone. RAF applies that same principle to AI. One group of agents proposes solutions. A completely separate group evaluates them. Neither group can see the other's reasoning before they weigh in. Every decision gets checked before anything moves forward. Building it was not clean or smooth. Agents drifted off task in ways I had not anticipated. One failing agent would crash an entire run. A single type mismatch silently broke the voting system at the exact moment agents were most confident in their answers. I found a security vulnerability where agents were making unauthorized requests to internal server endpoints by default. I found another where agents could execute arbitrary code on my machine without any permission being granted. Each of those failures sent me back to the drawing board, and each one taught me something I could not have learned any other way. The project has a provisional patent application pending. I have presented it at Vanderbilt and Yale. It is actively deployed, and anyone can try it. But what it gave me that I value most is not the patent or the competition placements. It is the understanding that comes from building something until it breaks, and then having to put it back together with more care than you started with. That is what working in technology does for me. It is one of the only fields where the distance between not knowing and knowing is mostly determined by how willing you are to sit with difficulty long enough to actually understand it. I have found that I am very willing. And I am not done building.

I did not grow up thinking education was optional. I grew up watching what happened to people who did not have access to it. In Nigeria, brilliance was never the problem. The people around me were sharp, creative, and hungry to build things. What they lacked was access to resources, to institutions, to the infrastructure that turns potential into opportunity. I decided early that I was not going to accept that gap as permanent. I left home at seventeen, took on a multi-million naira loan, and came to the United States alone, betting that education could change the trajectory not just of my life but of everyone I planned to bring with me. That bet is still being paid off, in every sense of the word. I am studying computer science at Fisk University, graduating this December, and currently completing my second software engineer internship at Google. This summer I built a tool that helps engineers automatically find and fix errors in software components before they reach real users, saving hours of manual work. Before that, I built an AI system that breaks down complex tasks and uses multiple AI models to check each other's work, the same way a team of people reviewing each other's decisions produces better results than one person working alone. It is patent pending and has been presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. I also founded a company after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify. My platform helps small businesses confirm who they are actually paying before money changes hands. My goal is to become a founder who builds technology that reaches the people most often left out of the systems everyone else takes for granted: the small business owner with no fraud protection, the student with no access to tools that could accelerate their learning, and the community that has never been considered the default user. Getting there requires finishing what I started. I am in my final semester carrying high-interest private loans and sending money home as my family's financial support. The pressure is real, and it is constant. Every dollar I do not have to chase is an hour I get back to focus on my education, my final semester, and the work that brought me here in the first place. Dr. Gentles believed that small acts of generosity create lasting impact. I have seen that firsthand. A mentor who loaned me money to stay enrolled when I had nothing left. A provost who signed off on a trip that became a permanent scholarship. Those moments changed the shape of everything that came after. This scholarship is that kind of moment. It is not about the amount. It is about what it means to have someone believe in the work and give me just enough peace of mind to finish it.

I will use my degree the same way I have already started using everything I have built: to close the gap between people and the systems that are supposed to protect them. That mission started with someone real. A family friend who runs a small business paid a vendor she had no way to verify, and the money disappeared along with him. There was no system in place to confirm who she was actually dealing with, no infrastructure protecting her the way large companies protect themselves as a matter of course. What happened to her was not an isolated failure. It was the predictable result of who gets to build the systems the rest of us depend on, and I decided I wanted to be one of those people instead of one more person left exposed by decisions made without me. I am a Computer Science student at Fisk University, finishing my degree this December, and currently back at Google for a second Software Engineer internship. I built Tatin, a payment identity platform, directly in response to what happened to my family friend. It replaces insecure bank detail sharing with verified business identities, so small businesses can confirm who they are actually paying before money changes hands. I also built RAF, a multi-agent AI system now patent pending, by teaching myself research I did not fully understand at first, because waiting for someone else to hand me the answer was never something I was willing to do. My plan to use my degree for my community goes beyond any one product. I am building a structured mentorship pipeline for HBCU computer science students, starting with five students this year, pairing them with mentors already working in tech, and tracking whether each one lands an internship by year end. I want to grow that into a nonprofit that funds conference travel, technical certifications, and internship stipends for students who cannot afford to take unpaid opportunities, the same barrier that almost kept me out of the opportunities that changed my own life. I have already proven this model works at a smaller scale. I served as President of the Black Student Union at my former university, where I organized six students to raise over ten thousand dollars to attend a national engineering conference with no institutional backing to start from. That effort became a permanent scholarship for the students who came after us, students I will never meet but who will not have to fight as hard as we did. I am the first in my family to attend college. I came here at seventeen with no one ahead of me to ask how any of this worked, so I built the answers as I went. My degree is not the finish line of that story. It is the credential that lets me take what I have already started building, in fintech, in AI, and in mentorship, and scale it to reach people I have not met yet but already understand, because I used to be them.

I chose computer science the day I watched someone I love hand over her trust to a stranger she had no way to verify, and lose money she could not afford to lose. She runs a small business. The vendor she paid disappeared. There was no system in place to confirm who she was actually dealing with, no infrastructure protecting her the way large companies protect themselves. What happened to her was not an isolated failure. It was the predictable result of who gets to build the systems the rest of us depend on. I could not fix what already happened to her, but I could not stop thinking about how many other people like her were exposed to the exact same gap. Black students earn only about 7 percent of STEM degrees in this country, and the gap is even wider in fields like engineering. That is not just a representation problem. It means the systems being built reflect the assumptions of the people building them, and those assumptions consistently leave out the communities that need protection the most. I wanted to be one of the people actually in the room making those decisions instead of one more person affected by decisions made without me. I am a Computer Science student at Fisk University, finishing my degree this December, and currently back at Google for a second Software Engineer internship. I built RAF, a multi-agent AI system now patent pending, by teaching myself research I did not fully understand at first, the same instinct that pushed me into this field in the first place. My direct answer to what happened to my family friend is Tatin, a payment identity platform that replaces insecure bank detail sharing with verified business identities, so small businesses can confirm who they are actually paying before money changes hands. My plan for uplifting my broader community is just as concrete. I am building a structured mentorship pipeline for HBCU computer science students, starting with five students this year, pairing them with mentors already working in tech, and tracking whether each one lands an internship by year end. I want to grow that into a nonprofit that funds conference travel, technical certifications, and internship stipends for students who cannot afford to take unpaid opportunities, the same barrier that almost kept me out of the opportunities that changed my life. I served as President of the Black Student Union at my former university, where I organized six students to raise over ten thousand dollars to attend a national engineering conference with no institutional backing to start from. That effort became a permanent scholarship for students who came after us. That is the model I plan to repeat at a larger scale: build the thing that did not exist yet, even without a guarantee it will work. STEM is not a personal achievement to me. It is the only tool I have ever found that can actually close the gap between who technology protects and who it leaves exposed. I am pursuing it because I have already watched what happens when that gap goes unaddressed, and I refuse to walk past it again.

I learned to play chess from my father, sitting across a board he had carried with him through more moves and more years than I could count at the time. He did not just teach me openings or tactics. He taught me to read a room the way I would read a board, because to him they were the same thing. I remember one game where I kept losing pieces trying to force an attack that was not actually there. My father stopped me mid-game and told me something I still think about. He said not everyone on the board moves the same way, sees the same way, or acts the same way, and the player who wins is the one who studies the whole board before making a single move, not just the piece in front of them. He pointed at the king, the most heavily guarded piece with the least range of movement, and told me that value is not about how far something can move. It is about what it actually means to the whole position. He said the same is true of people. Anyone in a room can be the most valuable piece depending on how you choose to see them and how you choose to engage them. That lesson is still where most of my real career thinking comes from. I am a Computer Science student at Fisk University finishing my degree this December, currently back at Google for a second Software Engineer internship. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify, and I built RAF, a multi-agent AI system now patent pending. Building a system where dozens of agents have to coordinate without collapsing into chaos came easier to me because I had already learned, years earlier, to see a whole board before reacting to a single piece. That same lesson shaped how I network and lead. I treat people the way my father taught me to treat pieces on a board, by recognizing that not everyone offers the same value in the same way, and the people who seem to have the least obvious range often turn out to matter the most. I have carried that into mentoring students and building teams, learning to see what someone actually brings rather than assuming everyone should move the same way. I still play in the park with men three times my age and tutor chess at local schools, passing on the same patience my father gave me. Chess did not just teach me a game. It taught me how to actually see people, which has shaped how I build, lead, and grow far more than any single move ever could.

I am African American by citizenship now, though my story started in Nigeria, where I left home at seventeen with no family in the United States and no real plan beyond a belief that hard work could turn into something real. That belief is still the engine behind everything I am working toward. I chose computer science because of a gap I kept seeing in every system I came into contact with. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black workers make up around 7 percent of the computer and mathematical workforce in the United States, despite being roughly 13 percent of the population. The systems that gap produces end up reflecting that absence, whether it is facial recognition that fails on darker skin or financial tools that assume everyone already has a credit history. I taught myself to implement two AI research papers I barely understood because I wanted to be one of the people actually building those systems, not just affected by them. That became RAF, a multi-agent AI system now patent pending and presented at Vanderbilt and Yale. I am currently back at Google for a second Software Engineer internship, and I am finishing my degree at Fisk this December. My professional goal is to become a founder who builds technology that protects people who are usually left out of the systems built to protect everyone else. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor she had no way to verify before sending money. Small businesses lose real money every year to exactly that kind of fraud, and the businesses most exposed are usually the ones with the least access to the legal and financial protection larger companies take for granted. Tatin exists to close that specific gap, starting with vendor payment verification for small businesses that cannot afford a fraud team or a lawyer on retainer. My civic service commitment follows the same thread, but I want to be specific about what that looks like rather than just stating it as a value. I served as President of the Black Student Union at my former university, where I organized six students to raise over ten thousand dollars and attend a national engineering conference with no institutional support to start from. That effort became a permanent scholarship at the school. Going forward, my concrete plan is to build a structured mentorship pipeline, not informal advice given when someone happens to ask, but a real program. Year one looks like this: I pair five incoming HBCU computer science students with mentors currently working in tech, run monthly sessions on resumes, technical interviews, and the unwritten rules of breaking into the industry, and track whether each student lands at least one internship by the end of the year. The first cohort would be funded out of pocket and run through whatever student organization or alumni network at Fisk will host it. If it works, I want to formalize it into a nonprofit that partners directly with HBCU computer science departments to provide funding for conference travel, technical certifications, and internship stipends for students who cannot afford to take unpaid opportunities, the same barrier that nearly kept me out of NSBE entirely. I am not asking for this scholarship because I have run out of ways to make my own path work. I am asking because every dollar I do not have to find elsewhere is time I get back to build the mentorship pipeline in year one instead of year three, and to keep building Tatin into something that actually protects the businesses it was built for.

There was a stretch of a couple of years where I thought I might not make it to college at all. I was broke. Not the kind where you cut back on going out, but the kind where I could not pay rent for two months because every dollar was going toward loans already in collections back home. I sat with the math, and there was no version where I could register for classes and keep a roof over my head. My mentor, Mrs. Ashanique Moore, someone I met through family who became far more than a friend, stepped in. She had spent years working as an accountant, the kind of person who could look at a bad financial situation and see a way through it. She loaned me the money to register for classes when I had nothing left, then sat with me on a video call one night and told me that staying where I was would keep me stuck in the same hole. That conversation is the reason I took on additional loans to transfer to Fisk University, a decision that changed everything. Mrs. Moore was also the reason I made it to America at all. Before college, I had a visa interview, the one appointment that determined whether any of this was possible. I got stuck in traffic and missed it. I remember the panic of realizing that one missed appointment could undo everything. It was Mrs. Moore again who sent me the money to book a second interview within the week. Without that phone call, I would not be in this country. What I learned from both moments is that asking for help is not weakness, it is what makes forward movement possible at all. I used to think I had to figure everything out alone, especially as someone who left home at seventeen with no family here. But I am only here because Mrs. Moore believed in me enough to bet money on me twice, in two of the most fragile moments of my life. That belief is what I am building on now. I am currently a software engineer intern at Google, returning for a second summer. I founded Tatin, a payment identity platform, after watching a family friend get scammed by a vendor with no way to verify who she was paying, and I am working to get it into the hands of ten small businesses by the end of this year. I also served as president of the Black Student Union at Whitworth University, my former school, where I organized six students and raised over ten thousand dollars to send us to a national engineering conference, an effort that later became a permanent scholarship there. With time I want to start a nonprofit that does for other Nigerians and my community what Mrs. Moore did for me, not one phone call in a crisis but real structure: scholarships for students who hit the same wall I hit and training that prepares people for the careers they are capable of. This scholarship would let me stop choosing between paying down what I owe Mrs. Moore and the loan companies and investing the time Tatin needs to grow. Every hour spent covering a bill is an hour not spent building what I came here to build and the nonprofit beyond it. I am asking for the room to put my full effort where it belongs, so the next time someone calls me at midnight needing the kind of help Mrs. Moore gave me, I am already in a position to give it.

"Where are you from?" The question always comes with a pause before I answer. I'm from Nigeria. I came here at seventeen, alone. People don't usually expect what comes after that sentence. I remember walking into stores, watching three or four officers show up within minutes of me browsing. Nobody called them for a reason. I hadn't done anything. My presence alone was apparently reason enough. I remember calling places and getting met with attitude before I'd even finished a sentence. I remember being told, flat out, that I wasn't welcome. I remember walking down streets and watching kids run the other way, watching adults cross to the other side like I was something to avoid. I was seventeen. I didn't have family here to come home and cry to about any of it. I just had to keep walking. For a while I lived with an adoptive family while my paperwork to stay in this country worked its way through. I was the one doing the dishes. The yard work. The stuff nobody else wanted to touch. I told myself it was only for now, even on nights I wasn't sure I believed that. Back home, before I left, I had a mentor, not blood, but he might as well have been. He taught me when to speak and when to stay quiet. How to respond instead of react. How to grow thick skin without letting it turn bitter. I held onto that more than almost anything else those first couple years. What kept me going was looking around and seeing that people who looked like me were still becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers. Still building things. Still being taken seriously somewhere, even if it wasn't always where I was standing. That was enough to make me believe the way people treated me on a street corner wasn't the truth about who I was. It was just the truth about their fear. So I read more. I learned how to actually talk to people, how to build something real with strangers in a place where I started with nobody. I found others figuring this out the same way I was. We built something together. Eventually that path led me to Fisk, and for the first time since leaving Nigeria, I didn't feel like I had to explain myself just to exist in a room. That feeling taught me what it actually means to give back. My mentor never asked for anything in return for what he taught me. So I decided I wouldn't either. I started a company after a person I love got scammed by someone she had no way to verify or hold accountable. I built an AI system from research papers I didn't fully understand at first, because I'd rather struggle through something hard than wait for someone to hand it to me easy. I lead a student group now, trying to build the kind of space I wish someone had built for me sooner. None of this came easy. None of it came with a map. It came from being followed around stores and still choosing, every time, to believe in the doctors and engineers who looked like me anyway. I wasn't supposed to make it this far without family, without money, without a single connection in this country. But I am here. I'm not just here to survive it. I'm here to build a new legacy, one where the next person who looks like me doesn't have to wonder if it's possible. They will already know, because they will see me standing right there.