Moving to Boston for grad school, I expected technical challenges. Data structures, algorithms, system design. What I didn't expect was how isolating it would feel.
Classes were manageable. Building community outside the classroom? That was the hard part. Most international students felt the same. We'd show up, sit through lectures, go home and repeat.
The resources existed. Career services, funding opportunities, networking events. But nobody knew how to find them. The gap wasn't in what the university offered. It was in making those resources visible.
I stumbled into Graduate Student Government looking for something familiar. They needed volunteers. I showed up. Helped with events, took notes, did whatever needed doing. A few months in, there was an opening for senator representing academic interests and I got selected.
That's when I saw the real problem. Grad students had no idea what was available to them. People felt disconnected not because resources didn't exist, but because finding them felt impossible. I knew I could fix this.
At Claim, I faced a similar problem. We wanted our landing page to feel alive. Animations seemed like the obvious move. Import some Lottie files, ship it. Except the app started crashing. Memory spiked from 300MB to 1.2GB in seconds. The fix wasn't adding more features. It was rebuilding the foundation so what we already had actually worked.
I ran for Executive Vice President to make networking easy and make resources visible. My pitch was simple. No fancy campaign, just "here's the problem, here's how we fix it." Then, mid-year, the president resigned. Suddenly, I wasn't VP anymore. I was the acting President. Representing 17,000 students. Managing a team of 90+ elected reps and volunteers. Coordinating with everyone from the Provost's office to student clubs.
We moved half a million dollars into student programs last fiscal year. Funded professional development workshops and social events that doubled as networking sessions. Students stopped feeling isolated. The programming worked because we planned it around what people needed, not what looked good on paper. I learned how to manage chaos, how to move fast when bureaucracy wants you to move slow, and how to make decisions when nobody agrees.
The best solutions come from watching real people struggle with real problems. Whether you're writing code or leading organizations, the approach is the same: listen to what people actually need, build something that works.
Recently, I built TrendPulse, a multi-agent AI system that analyzes social momentum across Reddit, YouTube, and news APIs. It helps companies decide where to spend ad budgets based on what's actually trending, not what sold last quarter.
Why does this matter? Because most companies are optimizing for lagging indicators. They're looking at last month's sales data while their competitors are riding real time momentum. TrendPulse changes that. It tells you where attention is moving before it shows up in your revenue reports.
Leadership isn't about having perfect answers or a clean plan. It's about showing up when things fall apart and figuring it out as you go.
Whether I'm debugging memory leaks at Claim, coordinating events for thousands of students, or building AI systems that track social momentum, the approach is the same: listen to what people actually need, build something that works, and ship fast.
The code I write matters. The systems I build matter. But what matters more is understanding the people who use them. That's what turns good engineers into leaders.