I'm writing this on the train to Paris. We're racing through Belgium right now and I have about an hour left in the ride. It's 4:03 PM in the afternoon and the sun is starting to set over the fields. We're tearing through the countryside at 187 MPH.

I'm going to see my high school best friends Anya and Ian, Anya's boyfriend, my friend Toby, and my relatively new friend Val. I couldn't be more excited as this is the first time I've stepped foot in France in over three years. I read Uzay's 2025 year recap on the train, and started watching Episode 3 of the final season of Dark. In the episode "Adam and Eva", at exactly 3:33 PM in the afternoon CET, Martha recalled to Jonas that he tried to convince the younger version of herself that experiencing deja vu was the process of the brain recalling a memory from the future.

"Under the bridge. The light. The forest. You. I. A glitch in the matrix."

Call me crazy, but I don't believe in coincidences. The number 333 has shown up in many places in my life, sometimes even once a day, sometimes multiple times a day. The price I pay for something, the amount of money in my bank account, the time left in the song when I happen to check, and very often the time of day. It has most notably shown up when I was on the headline of the Star Tribune, Minnesota's state newspaper, wearing my race bib from Spirit Mountain in Duluth during my junior year of high school in 2020.

I believe in magic. I believe that there is much that we don't understand, about the electromagnetic spectrum, about time, about intelligence. That someday what feels like magic now will be science. I believe in Dreams, intuition, and faith. I'll save the mechanisms of these theories for a later post.

There are times in life where I've "glitched". A single massive profound idea that falls into my lap randomly, usually after some major event. This year my biggest "glitch" was after HackMIT in September. I woke up and could not remember my phone password that I had for the past 6 months. Sure, maybe it was a flaw in my memory, but I genuinely tried every six number combination I could think of and it was none of them. I told my friend Joyce that I was convinced someone had changed my password somehow without me knowing, she thought I was insane. Regardless, I reset my phone completely and changed my password using my iCloud account and that was that.

A common theme in my life is ending up on a plane, no free Wifi, having to loop the same one-to-five songs over and over because for some reason I forget to download music, or I have to reset my phone, or my phone is dead. Previously it's been Quinn XCII, Labrinth, Sia, or Flipturn. The day I flew home from HackMIT was one such day, and I looped "The Adults are Talking" by The Strokes.

For a second, I invite you to slip into a brief moment in time, just after the Uber driver from MIT connected me with an Indian cloth supplier after I told him about the idea for my brand, SPoNGe.

I relish the feeling of the soft trickles of tears slipping out of the corners of my eyes, as my chest briefly caves for a cough of joy to bubble out of me.

I am walking to gate E10, fresh off of winning 3rd place at HackMIT with an incredible team of my favorite people on this planet. Serendipity and luck abound. Energy is high. God is good.

I've tried to explain my theory of energy to my therapist, my mom, my cousin, my best friend, my other friends, and I still don't think anyone has groked it quite as well as The Alchemist, specifically the wise old character written in Paulo Coelo's novel, "The Alchemist". I know it's woo, but I am a big believer that there are physical principles rooted in the E&M laws that we haven't completely wrapped our heads around as a human race. Take BCIs for example, or even LLMs. We don't fundamentally know WHY they work. Why exactly does gradient descent work? We know the process, but we don't know the fundamental reason. Why did evolution design neural networks in the way it did? Efficiency? Pleasure? Survival?

If it all boils down to that then why do humans care so much about art? About a random niche flavor of cheese? Chasing a piece of plastic down a field?

I claim there are spiritual things in this world that are rooted in physical principles we haven't fully discovered yet.

Anyways, back to the plot.

The $550 Gamble

So I was debating whether or not to fly to Boston. The flight was $550 from Minneapolis and I was to miss three classes on Monday, and have to Uber straight to school to make my final class. But I stuck to my guns. My guns being the heuristics of a) life is short, b) I want to live the best adventure I can, and c) I in part love life and continue to exist because of how dearly and intensely I loved my friends.

Sidenote, a funny thing about Spotify on the plane is that it caches random songs. It's like playing Minesweeper, except I click around on songs and see if they're lucky and play the first 0:01 or cooked and stay at 0:00.

Anyways, I pulled the trigger. I booked it. Already in $2000 borrowed from future Sophia from my Taco Bell scholarship from the Spring to pay for my end-of-summer California trip, and a potential $1500 for this trip and the past month, I still pulled the trigger. See, I have an interesting relationship with money. My aunt likes to say "I never think about money, when I need it, God provides". And although this is very naive, I think it gives her some arbitrary level of confidence such that she actually inspired the people around her to come together and help her chase her dream of opening an art gallery and building a life in Carmel. I don't exactly take this approach, but it is pretty funny how many times I've been almost-in-debt, or properly in debt in the last week of the month and I need to pay my credit card bill and a Manifund grant comes through, or I get $5k more of my scholarship for this year, or I win a pitch competition for $1.5k, or in this case (spoiler), I win $2k of hackathon money.

An Unquiet Mind

To be very upfront, I struggle with bipolar. A symptom of this is impulsive spending. This has bitten me in the butt before, particularly on a trip to Washington to celebrate a boy's birthday in The Enchantments, when I had maxed out my credit card, drained my bank account, and was overdue on Apple Payments for my subscriptions so Apple wouldn't let me download any new apps on my iCloud account. The Frontier agents weren't at the counter because I had arrived at the airport with 30 minutes to spare and I couldn't download the Frontier app, and Frontier won't let you download your boarding pass online within 60 minutes of the flight, so I missed my flight.

It does burn me sometimes. But for a large part of my life, having such drastic highs and lows is incredible. On the way to Boston, I finished the entire memoir "An Unquiet Mind" written by Kay Redfield Jamison. I've genuinely never felt more understood. This passage helps paint a picture of the addiction that mania can feel like sometimes:

"My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses. It was a large class, and everyone's answers were passed forward and handed to the professor. He read aloud from a sort of random selection; midway through I heard a recital of somewhat odd associations, and I realized to my great horror that they were mine. Some of them were humorous, but a few of them were simply bizarre. Or so they seemed to me. Most of the class was laughing, and I stared at my feet in mortification. When the professor had finished reading my intensely scribbled sheets, he asked if the person who had written those particular responses would please stay behind to talk with him for a while. I was convinced that, being a psychologist, he could see straight into my psychotic underpinnings. I was terrified. Looking back on it, what I suspect he actually saw was someone who was very intense, quite determined, serious, and probably rather troubled. At the time, being acutely aware of just how disturbed I really was, I assumed that the extent of my problems was equally obvious to him. He asked me to walk back to his office with him, and, while I was conjuring up images of being admitted to a psychiatric ward, he said that in all of his years of teaching he had never encountered such "imaginative" responses to the Rorschach. He was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre and original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written."

— Kay Redfield Jamison, "An Unquiet Mind"

I want to get a patent. I want to start building. I want to build my clothing brand and website. I want to create the full vector art for 'Sota hacks. I want to show the world what I'm capable of.

When you have bipolar, being manic feels like you're high on epinephrine, being grateful feels like you're on MDMA. Being sleep deprived feels like you're on shrooms. Being depressed feels like there is genuinely no reason to live. Kay Redfield Jamison also paints an incredibly accurate picture:

"I would wake up in the morning with a profound sense of dread that I was going to have to somehow make it through another entire day. I would sit for hour after hour in the undergraduate library, unable to muster up enough energy to go to class. I would stare out the window, stare at my books, rearrange them, shuffle them around, leave them unopened, and think about dropping out of college. When I did go to class it was pointless. Pointless and painful. I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me. I felt utterly alone, and watching the animated conversations between my fellow students only made me feel more so. I stopped answering the telephone and took endless hot baths in the vain hope that I might somehow escape from the deadness and dreariness."

— Kay Redfield Jamison, "An Unquiet Mind"

This is just the reality of my mind, my emotions, and my soul. I don't know what combination of genes contributes to this, James Watson is working on the magical polygenic combo with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, maybe I'll work on that. But we know empirically it's genetic, and I know empirically my grandma on my mom's side had bipolar, along with multiple of my extended family members. So, I'm not insane, at least I don't think so, it's just part of who I am, in the same way that my allergies, and my asthma are.

On Faith

That was a dark segway, but on a happier note, I want to talk about faith. One of my favorite quotes on faith comes from "Lessons in Chemistry":

"Rich people use post office boxes to shield themselves from unwanted correspondence. It's like a garbage can for mail." He reached down to his satchel and after some riffling, came up with a slip of paper. Handing it to her he said, "Here it is, the box number. But please, Mad, don't get your hopes up." "I don't have hopes," Mad explained, studying the address. "I have faith." He looked at her in surprise. "Well, that's a funny word to hear coming from you." "How come?" "Because," he said, "well, you know. Religion is based on faith." "But you realize," she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, "that faith isn't based on religion. Right?"

— Bonnie Garmus, "Lessons in Chemistry"

The Time My Worldview Shattered

I grew up religious, Lutheran to be specific. I loved Jesus, the Trinity, the Lord's prayer, I loved Sunday school, I loved playing Bass guitar in the adult services. And then, as some of you know, when I was 15 the pastor of my church had an affair with a singer and it completely shocked me and thus, my worldview started to crack. People weren't perfect, a man who I was supposed to respect and trust, let down the entire congregation. People picked sides, people fought, I poured through the constitution documents to no avail. There was no way to fix it. So I turned inward. What was the point of life? Why were we here? What was my purpose? Did I have a purpose? Did we go somewhere after we died? Was the world deterministic? How much control did I really have?

This set off a quest to figure out how to help the most people and be freed from my parents who were still holding going to church over 16 year old me. I schemed hard from ages 16 to 18. I wanted to buy a van and renovate it and leave Minnesota. At the same time Covid hit. I happened to move to Montana with some friends, and lived in West Yellowstone for a month to train for cross country skiing every day and do school remotely. There have been a lot of critical plot points in my life, and that was certainly one of them. I wish I had the SD cards of the vlogs I made from that era, but sadly they fell out of my SD card case and down a Berkeley sewer in 2023 #rip.

Finding My People

So where is this story going? Well, it leads to people. By the end of high school, I had become sufficiently inspired by Einstein, Elon, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Botez sisters that I decided it was possible that people like me existed. I just didn't know where to find them. So I turned to college applications. I settled on Harvard. I wanted to cross country ski there. The coach at the time, Chris City and I were talking, I visited the school to tour, and fell in love.

So, I worked my butt off, if you want more details about my senior year of high school, see this video.

Long story short, I got rejected. My next dream school on the list was UCSD for nanoengineering.

But sadly it was $60k a year out of state with tuition and living costs, and that was too much to afford without taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. So I found a coding bootcamp in California kudos to a few really helpful people on LinkedIn to get in-state tuition.

If you want the rundown, see this post on the EA forum, but long story short, I ended up moving to Berkeley, finding Effective Altruism, the Atlas Fellowship, an EA Berkeley (shoutout Aris, Sofya, and Nat), and fell in love. I had finally found a community where I felt seen, where I felt like I belonged. Where my questions were met with enthusiasm and critical thought, and people shared the same values about progress and the future that I did.

September 2025

Fast forward three years from my first fall away from Minnesota, and it's now September of 2025. I have a ~100 person friend group that I love dearly made up of mostly Hack Clubbers, and Rat-adjacent 18-22 year olds. I am at college I finally love, with intelligent and kind professors, 20 person class sizes, and am currently in four pure technical EE classes.

But I'm not satisfied. Mostly I'm a lovesick 21 year old, but I'm also hungry, hungry to show the world what I'm capable of.

As I was sitting outside the gate, one of the people who knows me best in the world, one of my best friends texted me:

Where Am I Headed?

So what's the plan? Where am I headed? What do I want?

I don't know exactly. But I hope it's grad school in nanoengineering at UCSD. For now I'm riding the high that was HackMIT 2025. I'm going to stay on top of my schoolwork, attempt to get As (I have a 3.0 right now but I intend to graduate with a 3.5). I want to build the Beacon prototype, I want to run game nights, I want to get a rudimentary version of my clothing brand out, I want to develop UST Nexus, and I want to build a team that rallies around making 'Sota hacks the best Hackathon the best hackathon the Midwest has even seen, and finally, I'd like to start a nightclub next fall with robot fights in Minnesota, (oh hey Verda ;)).

Thank you to everyone who made this weekend incredible, cheers to more adventures <3

The Long Game

In case you were curious about my much longer term plans, I want to have houses in Brazil, Big Sur, Lakeside, Interlaken, St. Paul, and Cinque Terre. I want to learn Russian and Mandarin. I want to create nanorobots on the cell level. I think I still want 9 kids, but only want to birth 2 of those, and adopt the rest. I'm optimistic for 2026, this will be our year.

Cheers to faith, hard work, and serendipity.