Every Friday afternoon, my world bridges a gap of a million miles. On the other end of the line is my daughter back home in Uganda, waiting for me to help her with her homework before I switch gears to tackle my own homework assignments for the week. Navigating life as a non-traditional student isn't easy, but living this dream has proven that returning to school is one of the best decisions I have ever made. My path into engineering started with curiosity and grew out of necessity. As a domestic violence survivor, part of my healing journey involved creating the Rego Foundation; a safe space club for young women with similar experiences who simply needed to talk to someone sharing their pain. Within the first six months, the club rapidly expanded to almost 850 young women. Suddenly, I faced the massive challenge of coordinating this growing group, keeping them connected, and finding solutions to complex problems I was encountering for the first time. We desperately needed a website to document our activities and seek support, but I lacked the finances to hire a developer. I then decided to teach myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using free online resources. The more I learned, the more captivated I became by the endless possibilities of computer science, particularly its power to solve real problems for communities like mine. For instance, during our meetings, the women would save small amounts of money. Traditionally, these funds were kept by group leaders in physical boxes inside their homes, a common but risky practice in rural communities. Using my newfound skills, I built a simplified digital system that empowered these women to securely save and document their transactions. Today, Rego Foundation has grown into a registered nonprofit organization that has reached over 8,000 young women across rural, marginalized communities in Uganda, providing them with mentorship, technical skills, and the confidence to pursue their dreams. These experiences solidified my passion for computer science and fueled my academic ambitions. My ultimate goal is to become a software engineer who creates scalable solutions for marginalized communities facing systemic challenges, and I moved to the United States to pursue that exact dream. I believe I am the best candidate for this scholarship because I know firsthand the courage and sacrifice it takes to rebuild your life from scratch and navigate an unconventional academic path. I am going to pursue my dream and also make the time to raise my daughter, no matter the distance between us. Like Chris, I have made it my mission in life to help others, whether that means simply listening to what they are going through, offering a hug, or building technical solutions that can transform entire communities. I feel incredibly blessed to have the opportunity to do this work. Receiving this scholarship will ease my financial burden, allowing me the time to truly concentrate on my studies and pass on my skills to the next generation of young people on my path.

I view code as the most efficient tool for social architecture. My entry into computer science wasn’t driven by a classroom assignment, but by a survival mandated search for structure after experiencing domestic violence. In the wake of trauma, I discovered that while my physical environment was volatile, syntax was consistent. I didn’t just learn to program; I learned to build a logical foundation for a life that had been stripped of one. My self-taught proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was the starting point for a deeper technical pursuit: leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve resource allocation failures. I am pursuing software engineering with a focus on graduate-level AI research, specifically in the field of Algorithmic Equity. My goal is to develop machine learning models that account for thin data profiles. In many underserved communities, traditional data for financial vetting simply doesn't exist. I aim to build AI systems that can interpret alternative data points, such as community-based savings habits, to unlock institutional access for those who are currently invisible to standard algorithms. The qualitative data for my technical ambitions comes from my work as founder at Rego Foundation. What began as a safe-space club for survivors has scaled to reach over 8,000 young women across Uganda. As we grew, I saw exactly where manual, informal processes failed. This led me to develop RegoNow, a digital framework designed to formalize and secure the group-savings systems common in these communities. By digitizing these informal economies, I am creating the very datasets needed to eventually deploy AI-driven financial tools that accurately reflect the creditworthiness of marginalized entrepreneurs. For instance, in a traditional FinTech model, an algorithm might look at a woman in Uganda and see "no bank account, no credit history, low-income area" and assign a high-risk score. An Equity-driven AI, however, would be designed to recognize consistent weekly contributions to a community savings circle (RegoNow), 100% repayment rate within that circle and a growing micro-enterprise. My non-technical background gives me a ground-truth edge over other engineers. I do not build for a hypothetical user; I build for the women I sit with every week who require secure, low-latency tools to protect their capital and build sustainable, self-sufficient lives. I intend to establish a Technology and Innovation Center that operates as a hybrid incubator—a production house where young people use modern tech stacks to solve local logistical and financial bottlenecks. By combining AI research with localized fintech tools, I plan to create an ecosystem where technical skill leads directly to economic autonomy. A biased algorithm is a social failure, and a social problem is often a system awaiting a better architectural solution. I am not looking to join the tech industry to maintain the status quo; I am here to re-engineer the points of entry for those who have been systematically left offline.