Iam a tech founder, innovator, entrepreneur, machine learning researcher, and high school student.
At age 15, my life seems to be a series of beginnings, but I’ve found that sometimes you don’t recognize the start of something important until after it’s happened. Before everything else, I was a primary school kid who really liked computers.
I began coding when I was six years old by bouncing cartoon cats around the edges of my screen. Scratch, the tool MIT released to teach kids about coding when I was about five years old, was full of fun characters (“sprites”) that you could rotate and whose colors you could change by dragging vibrant blocks of code into the window. The blocks would join together with a satisfying “snap” that I can still recall. I remember sitting on my grandmother’s couch many days after school, holding a heavy laptop, and playing with the sprites, before I began looking into other users’ projects and starting to figure out more complex structures.
A few years later, my interest turned from games and animations to mobile apps. I stuffed my heavy laptop into my parents’ black mesh computer bag and took the bus to First Code Academy, one of the first coding schools in Hong Kong (where I lived at the time), which was founded by a female entrepreneur, Michelle Sun, who had just returned from Silicon Valley.
Learning loops, logic, and user interfaces at First Code was exciting and presented three beginnings for me: it was the first time I learned about developing mobile apps, which is a significant part of my work now; it was the first time I was one of the youngest people in the room, a role to which I’ve since become accustomed; and it was the first time I was one of very few girls, if not the only girl, in the room, another role I’ve since gotten very used to.
There was no single event that gave me my start down this path. I had no “aha” moment animating cats on my grandma’s couch in Hong Kong or listening to girls from across the world pitch their solutions for social injustice in an auditorium in San Francisco. It wasn’t just the fact that I’m often the youngest person in the room, or the only girl, or the only computer science geek, that made me want to create something that was meaningful to me and, ideally, to millions of Alzheimer’s patients around the world. But all of these small moments have broadened my understanding of what it means to be a girl in the 21st century who wants to improve the world, and who wants to become her best self.
Someone recently asked me what I would want to achieve if I had unlimited resources. I said that I would cure Alzheimer’s, expand the way we leverage machine learning, and optimize research for diagnostic tools. At Timeless, we’re working on it. And in the meantime, I’ll keep my eyes and mind open for new opportunities, because you never know what might change the future.