About Me

I grew up in the heart of Los Angeles—first on La Brea and Rodeo (now Obama Boulevard) near Crenshaw, and later in Hawthorne. I wasn't just raised by my grandparents; I was community-raised by a collection of neighbors who helped shape who I am today. Moving between these different parts of LA gave me something invaluable: a deep, rooted connection to this city and its people.

I'm part of the first generation to grow up with ready access to the internet and social media—technology was exploding around us as we came of age. My childhood was punctuated by an ever-growing collection of gaming hardware: Game Boy Color and Advance, DS, GameCube, Wii, Xbox (original through One), PSP, PlayStation 2 through 4, and eventually a personal PC. These weren't just devices—they were portals through which I made formative memories, connecting with family and friends in ways previous generations never could.

But here's the thing: I never saw myself as a "computer guy." I was just someone who loved playing games. What I really enjoyed was working with my hands—building things from wood, Legos, metal, Play-Doh, whatever materials I could get my hands on. I was a maker at heart, fascinated by how things were put together.

There's one memory that crystallizes this fascination: the day my PSP broke. Was I devastated that I could no longer spend nights hiding under blankets playing games? Absolutely. But when I opened it up and saw the motherboard, the fan, the disc tray—I couldn't look away. They were so intricate, so detailed. No matter where you looked, there was always more to see. Layer upon layer of complexity, all working together to create something magical.

Years later, when I applied to LMU's Computer Science program, I returned to this memory. I titled my personal statement "Technocivil Architecture"—framing my desire to learn not just how to use computers, but how to breathe life into these tiny silicon cities. That broken PSP showed me a world I wanted to be part of building.

I attended Richard Henry Dana Middle School (now Wiseburn Middle School) in the Wiseburn School District. To be completely honest, I was not a great student. Like most middle schoolers, I was delinquent on homework, constantly watching the clock until the bell rang for recess or lunch. I'd engage meaningfully with class when I wanted to—getting excited about history projects or asking for help with math homework when I needed it—but I was hardly setting the world on fire academically.

Then there was PLTW—Project Lead The Way—an early STEM education program my school offered. I didn't seek it out or make some conscious decision to pursue engineering. I simply "fell" into it, choosing it as one of my electives without much thought. PLTW and its curriculum did the rest.

What made PLTW different was that we didn't sit through boring physics lectures or endless slide presentations. We made things. We built mousetrap cars with coffee stick axles, coin wheels, and playing card frames. We used AutoDesk to 3D model trains and furniture through these huge step-by-step packets. This was a form of education I could actually latch onto. I hated sitting still and being told how the world worked—PLTW let the world show me what it was about. That difference was everything.

That experience taught me two crucial things. First, I didn't like feeling lost—but not in a way that made me want to avoid challenges. Rather, it lit a fire in me to learn, to build up knowledge so I could tackle problems with confidence. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I learned that I wanted to make things.

Solving problems in math class felt pointless and flat, like the paper we solved them on and eventually threw away. But solving problems in PLTW? We crafted physical solutions. We created things we could take home and use. No amount of multiplication tables felt like progress, but learning how to build something? That made an impact on the world by creating something tangible, something you could touch and use. History dates and facts felt hollow compared to the satisfaction of a working mousetrap car.

I didn't like just "knowing" stuff—I liked doing stuff. And I gained an appreciation for knowledge and the brain being the major "muscle group" you needed to work out to create things that mattered.

I wasn't a superstar in PLTW. I wasn't a genius or a big deal. My grades never particularly stood out, and I got some special recognition here and there, but nothing that made me different from everyone else. I certainly remember the superstar students who took to everything immediately, the ones teachers always called on—but I wasn't one of them. And that's okay. I was just a kid who liked working with his hands.

Most of my time in PLTW was spent creating non-electronic things—cars, furniture, tools, even pieces of a board game if I remember correctly. (It's not like they were going to let middle schoolers mess around with live circuits!) My fascination with "technocivil architecture" remained purely physical. I imagined crafting structures on motherboards like buildings: create a design document, CAD up a 3D model, run stress simulations to ensure the structure would hold.

Of course, I had no idea that electronics aren't made the way buildings are. But that's how I saw it anyway. I believed I needed to learn how to make more things to eventually learn how electronics worked—not knowing that mechanical engineering doesn't cover that at all! Still, that misconception drove me forward. By the end of middle school, I knew I wanted to work with and build things, and that conviction led me to apply to Da Vinci Science, a STEM-focused high school where I hoped to continue this journey.

Getting into Da Vinci Science (DVS) was an exercise in luck. As a public charter school operating outside the typical state curriculum, admission was determined by lottery. If you lived nearby, your odds were weighted higher—and I was lucky. I actually knew friends whose parents had moved into the school district just to boost their chances of getting in, but I had no idea at the time. I walked into DVS thinking I was about to have the same high school experience as everybody else in the world.

That ignorant bliss meant I brought all my bad habits with me from middle school. I wasn't a "good student" until junior year, so early on I was just as delinquent as I'd always been. Due to a funny quirk in Common Core 8, I'd learned a bit of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in 8th grade, which meant I tested into geometry instead of algebra 2 in high school. My geometry class was taught by Mr. Hurtado in a temporary bungalow building with a long ramp out front. He'd check our homework right at the door before we could sit down. So naturally, when I'd forgotten to do my homework, I'd purposefully go to the back of the line and hastily copy answers from my friends. And I got away with it, too.

I bring this up because I wasn't a good student at the beginning. It was FRC—FIRST Robotics Competition—that would eventually "clean up" my act.

Two Weeks That Changed Everything

After settling into school, we had a club day where booths were set up in the lunch area for extracurriculars. Chess club, CrossFit club, Youth and Government (which, ironically, became the second largest club and later competed with us for funding), and many others. I really didn't want to do extracurriculars—it meant less time to go home and play games with friends, less time to do my own thing.

But my brother pleaded with me to do what he'd done in high school. He made me promise to try FRC for two weeks, and if I didn't like it, I could leave and never look back. So I signed up for two clubs: Game Club (the one I wanted) and FRC (the one my brother told me to). I ended up surprising both of us—I dropped Game Club to spend more time at FRC.

Four Years of Growth

I joined Team 4201, the Vitruvian Bots—a team of around 50 students. My first year was about learning to learn and figuring myself out as much as figuring out the robot. I joined the mechanical side: I CADed parts, assembled field elements, and used power tools to bring our collective vision to life.

In my second year, I got my first-ever leadership position: Field Construction Lead. Admittedly, it was a minor role—a title to make us feel important—but I was responsible for managing about five others. We'd be given design papers and had to cut out wooden parts to assemble field elements for practice.

After maturing greatly in my third year, I joined the coveted CNC manufacturing part of the team. I learned MasterCAM and how to command a massive machine to cut parts from metal instead of wood. This was it—this was the future I wanted.

In my final year, I became our team's Manufacturing Lead, responsible for everything concerning the budgeting, purchase, delivery, handling, cutting, shaping, and cleaning of all metal parts for the robot. I led around eight people to accomplish it all. That year, we went to the FRC World Championships in Houston and made it all the way to the final game—the world championship game, held in a baseball stadium. And we won.

The Mountain I Didn't Mean to Climb

If I had to list all the memorable moments from FRC—all the events, competitions, long nights in the lab, the fears that kept me engaged, the wins, the amazing people I shared months of daily work with—we'd be here for years. But what's most important isn't any one event. It's that FRC was a wholistic transformation of myself and my desires. I wish every kid on Earth could experience it, and I'm forever grateful I was one of the lucky ones who got the chance.

FRC was an entire order of magnitude different from PLTW. PLTW was a special elective designed to get kids engaged in STEM through small, fun activities. FRC was a full-time job as a worker at a company, designing brand-new machines from scratch for unforgiving customers in only six weeks. If PLTW was what got me into engineering, FRC was what made me live what it truly was.

I'm still unsure to this day why I never became a mechanical engineer, but I can say it was the best decision I ever made. I applied for a major I had no skills in, zero high school experience to show for, at a college I'd never heard of (I only knew schools with bleeding-edge mechanical programs). I applied to Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University, was accepted, and embarked into a scary place I knew nothing about.

I am no prodigy. I'm just a kid who got a lucky chance to learn in a super engaging way, who stood at the top of one mountain and had the courage to admit it wasn't the right one.

Starting computer science with zero experience was terrifying. I went from being "at the top of my game" to being the one behind everyone else. Just like back in PLTW, I felt like I "didn't know how to swim" while everyone else steamed ahead—they'd all taken AP CS and already knew how to program. It was brutal in the beginning. I tried to rationalize concepts like variables and loops through physical interpretations, but many of those base primitives in CS don't map cleanly to things in mechanical engineering. Knowing how to manufacture aluminum didn't help me understand object-oriented programming.

The Aha Moments

I had many "aha" moments throughout my time in CS. From finally grasping static vs. dynamic in Java—which gave me the mental model for class-based OOP—to realizing that trees and nodes don't literally need to be stored as objects on the heap because they can be accurately modeled by an array. But the most important realization I ever made in CS wasn't about any particular topic of efficiency or computational optimization.

Some important undergraduate highlights, besides achieving key milestones in my journey as a software engineer, were related to the community I worked with and learned from every day. From the early friends I made in CSSI who helped me get through those hard freshman semesters, to the professors who put contortionists to shame bending over backward to ensure we learned during the COVID lockdowns, to the staff who work equally hard to maintain our classrooms, labs, and workspaces (many of whom I got to meet by staying late in labs—sometimes until 1 in the morning!).

The community at LMU's CS department reminded me of the special experience I'd had at FRC—a world-class experience that I'd once again be removed from after four years. Except this time, I had the ability to stay for at least one more year through the 4+1 master's program.

The Realization: I've Always Been a Teacher

I haven't mentioned this until now because it didn't seem to fit anywhere else, but all throughout my life, I was teaching people about everything I knew. I ran workshops in FRC. I led people not by commanding their every move but by teaching them the skills they needed to be self-sufficient. I'd always come home from school excited to tell my parents what I'd learned, amazed by everything there was to talk about. It was my natural way of sharing with others.

It took me until the end of my undergraduate education to realize this. I was always tutoring late nights in the CS lab for courses I wasn't even a TA for, just because those moments when someone else has their "aha" moment were, well, addicting. To see someone's eyes light up with excitement when all they were doing before was moping and struggling—it's incredible! I was making a real positive impact on others.

I realized that learning in CS never got old for me—not because it was a more interesting space than mechanical engineering, but because I've always loved teaching. And in essence, CS is just that: teaching someone who's struggling to get it right, and by making minor communication differences, I can help them reach that "aha" moment.

I pursued a master's degree not for more money, notoriety, or recognition from others, but because I was going to learn the theory behind teaching in its most pure form, and I very selfishly needed to know how to teach better.

Master's: The Theory of Teaching

After I had a better idea of why I enjoyed CS, my master's experience clicked in a way an academic experience never has for me. Every topic I learned—from computability theory to complexity theory, language and automata theory—they're all just the necessary building blocks to teach:

This was where my ability to teach was given a world-class deep dive into its every part, where I refined not only how I learn but how I help others do so too. It's also where I got the chance to explore where I truly love to work in CS: low-level systems.

Learning about concurrent and parallel systems truly felt like the real world—finally, the work I was programming reflected how our day-to-day experiences function. And the lower-level I went, the greater my ability to teach became as well. Automata theory taught me that you need to understand the underlying systems you're using to be optimal, and that I'd need to learn about operating systems if I was ever going to prove something about a piece of software all the way down to the very architecture it relies on.

Finally, I got to walk the streets of those small silicon cities that had enamored me my whole life.

After all my lived experiences, all the different spaces I learned in, all the topics I got bored of and left and came back to, the one thing that stayed with me through it all was my natural inclination to teach.

And so my path from there became clear: I had to make it my full-time job.