I grew up in a town outside of Chicago, IL. In high-school, I was in cross-country, and track-and-field as a runner. I was a mathlete, going to the Illinois state math competition one year. I also played the French horn.

I knew early that I was good at and enjoyed mathematics and science. Some of my favorite classes were my biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus classes because of the content. I also greatly enjoyed my European and American history classes as the teachers were excellently engaging.

I graduated second in my class of about 350 having received and accepted a Chancellor’s Scholarship at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

Undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln

I choose the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (UNL) for their highly accredited actuarial science program. I did one year of business school, got a 97% in accounting, but thought that it was dreadfully boring. That, combined with anxiety about taking the actuarial exams motivated me to consider jobs outside of finance.

I attended a presentation by a group of actuaries who made actuarial software instead and thought that that would be a sensible pivot for me. I took an intro to C programming class and was quickly hooked on computing. I switched to the School of Computing track with a second major in mathematics.

I was a teaching assistant for the same intro to C programming class and later a systems engineering class TA for Dr. Bohn. I was also a math resource center counselor and private tutor for a data structures and algorithms class. I greatly enjoyed all of those roles; it was fun working with the other students and sharing my passion for computers. I enjoyed low-level programming most, with the nitty-gritty of C being my favorite followed by C# for its simplicity in designing program architectures and Python as a good scratch-pad language for drafting ideas.

My second major at UNL was mathematics. The two favorite classes I took were elementary analysis and group theory. I really enjoyed my analysis class, but broadly I like discrete math better than analytical, perhaps because of the closer overlap with computer science. I also took a great deal of statistics classes in combination of my actuarial studies.

Outside of classes, I enjoyed climbing at the gym, where I was in the university climbing club before the pandemic paused the club. I also was and still am an avid board gamer. I was a regular attendee at the board game club’s weekly meetings where I enjoyed overly complex strategy games.

Senior design capstone with the USDA

My capstone project in the UNL school of computing was implementing an ArcGIS Online add-in for the United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resource Conservation Service (USDA NRCS). One of the functions of the Nebraska NRCS is protecting wetlands. My five colleagues and I made an ArcGIS add-in for the USDA to assist in collating water, soil, and plant samples to generate wetland surveying, determination, and delineation documentation.

On the team I was the project’s development manager and was tasked with assuring the team’s product was technically sound. I architected the program with an emphasis on code extensibility and maintainability. We had to change the database backing the tool and a future database change was anticipated, so the allowing future developers to easily adapt the application to organization needs was critical.

(See the project’s year-end review document on page 29)

Research with Dr. Variyam

My last year of university I received a National Science Foundation grant to do undergraduate with Dr. Variyam and his research on Weak Derandomizations in Time and Space Complexity. Our research was expanding on the work of Jakub Pawlewicz and Mihai Pătraᶊcu’s “Order Statistics in the Farey Sequences in Sublinear Time and Counting Primitive Lattice Points in Polygons” Algorithmica 55 (2009): 271-282.

Pawlewicz and Pătraᶊcu’s work developed an algorithm to compute order statistics in the Farey sequence using the Merten’s function. This connection reveals the Farey order-statistic function’s close connection with a host of other fundamental number-theory functions including the Möbius, Merten’s, Euler’s totient, prime-count, square-free, and Riemann’s Zeta functions. Dr. Variyam and I worked on developing a reduction complexity hierarchy between these functions.

I was also exploring a novel algorithm for approximating and computing the Farey sequence’s rank and order using it’s discrepancy—that is, the measure of the deviation of the Farey-sequence from being uniformly distributed. To this day, I am convinced the discrepancy function can be modeled as a fractal, eluding to a recursive algorithm to compute or approximate it. Much of my work was exploratory, using a Python to generate and plot Farey sequence and transformations of them. However, I was blocked from developing any concrete proofs about the Farey sequence by not knowing complex analysis, which is needed to understand and expand on much of the existing work on the subject.

After undergraduate

I graduated in 2023 with a bachelors in science from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, with majors in mathematics and computer science. For a time, I considered pursuing a PhD at UNL under the guidance of Dr. Variyam. I applied to the PhD program, was accepted and received a research assistantship for funding. Ultimately, however, I decided that it was neither the right time or opportunity for me. My work with Dr. Variyam was about as theoretical as one can get on the continuum of applied to theoretical computer science research. From my experience as systems engineering class teaching assistant and as development manager on my team with the USDA, I felt myself drawn more to applied computer science. While I still feel drawn to pursue a graduate degree in the future, I would prefer to do so after some time working in industry. I instead moved to Indianapolis seeking working as a software developer.

Working at non-profit Teachers’ Treasures

After a few months of unemployment in 2023 after graduation while seeking work, one day I decided “I’d rather work for free than not at all!” and looked around for volunteering opportunities in Indianapolis. I felt drawn to one in particular Teachers’ Treasures, an organization that collects and distributes school supplies to teachers of low-income schools in Marion county. After volunteering for a short time, I was offered paid, full-time work at Teachers’ Treasures as a warehouse associate. In addition to warehouse work, I also lead out volunteer groups in logistical tasks, ranging from stocking the store, and sorting donations, and operation during our shopping hours. During my time at Teachers’ Treasures from 2023-2024, we helped distribute approximately $13 million in school supplies free of charge to teachers in the Indianapolis metropolitan area.

Working at NCR Voyix

Seeking a career more closely aligned with my goal of working in IT, I started work at NCR Voyix in 2024 as a customer engineer—essentially a retail technology field service technician. There, I installed and repaired a variety of hardware, including networking equipment (switches, routers, access points, and cabling), self-checkout kiosks (coin and bill recyclers, computer head units, and peripherals), and general use computers. I also worked closely with our customers to deliver exceptional service, prioritizing timely response times, one-call resolution, and availability during business critical emergencies. At NCR, my passion for computer networking started to emerge. In Minnesota, I was one of a subset of technicians able to work on networking equipment. As such, a significant portion of my work was on diagnosing, fixing, or replacing cabling, routers, switches, and access points in our customers’ retail locations.