Education

I attended the University of New Hampshire starting in 2010, where I ran competitively for the Cross Country and Track and Field teams while pursuing a Computer Science degree. Just like high school, the team became family fast — but the level of commitment was closer to a second job: about three hours of practice every day, with races almost every week during the season.

Balancing that schedule with coursework was the biggest growth area of my college years. My high school coding background put me ahead in the entry-level courses, but as classes got harder I had to build real time-management skills — using TA workshops, leaning on resources available to student-athletes, and learning to plan around a schedule that didn’t leave much slack. I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and landed a job before graduation.

A few classes stood out:

Compilers (senior year) — We built a Java compiler in C, then wrote a program using our own compiler. Writing the code that sits underneath a tool I’d used for years without thinking about it was one of the more satisfying “lifting the hood” moments of my degree.

Senior Project — I worked on an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) as part of a UNH Engineering requirement, competing in a multi-challenge event in Michigan. My partner and I built the control system and the visual display for the onboard cameras. Collaborating with the mechanical engineers building the physical robot — and learning to bridge a software-first view of the problem with their engineering perspective — was some of the most valuable cross-discipline experience I got in school.

Algorithms (C++) — The first class where I didn’t feel ahead of the curve. It pushed past the obvious solutions and forced me to actually reason about time complexity at scale. One assignment had the professor benchmark every submission for speed, with extra credit for the fastest. My solution beat the class average but wasn’t close to the winner — and that gap stuck with me. I still chase that kind of question: what does the person who’s clearly better than me know that I don’t yet? It’s part of why I still chase the harder, faster solution today, not just the one that works.