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Note to My Recommenders

/ 3 min read

Motivations

Coming to college, my goal was simple: to the best in my field. It’s no secret that the return on investment or ROI for working hard in college is immense. Every semester, I seek to push myself in one way or another.

My goal is now a lot different: to join the startup space and eventually found my own. There are no timelines for this goal, just that I desire to eventually achieve it. I want to transfer to a college that will allow me to build greater connections to people in the startup space.

Strengths and Weaknesses

I’d like to think my greatest strength is my curiosity. I seem to have this inexplicable ability to fall down the deepest of rabbit holes by merely “flicking a switch” in my head. And maybe my drive, too, but there seems to be a lot of people with that.

My second greatest strength is probably my endurance. According to Celine Halioua, starting a startup is like “waking up and chewing on glass every day.” My toxic trait is telling me I could do it. As someone who has had to balance school + organizing a hackathon + leading a software team + life, I really think so, but I can’t wait to be proven wrong.

My greatest weakness has been my ability to prioritize. Looking at the most successful people (career-wise, in the startups), what often stands out is their mercilessness in achieving their goals. I find that I often want to be apart of anything and everything, to be and feel a part of something greater than myself. I’m still working on saying no.

Kevin’s College Timeline

First semester of college (Fall 2022):

  • Joined ACM Outreach - a program that went to local high schools and taught among other things. I also spoke at an industry panel at a local high school to inspire others to pursue engineering.
  • Joined Nebula Labs Planner - a team of students building a degree planning tool because the existing one sucked. I would go on to lead this team. https://www.utdplanner.com/
  • Worked a part-time free lancing job maintaining a voting candidacy website called We Believe We Vote (the company was hyper conservative politically, but I just wanted a job).
  • Applied to a ton of internships (around 250+). Google was just one of 4 companies to give me an interview. It was the only one I needed!

Second semester (Spring 2023):

  • Joined HackUTD organizing team - a hackathon is a 36-48 hour competition where a team of 4 or less build a software solution to a real world problem, are judged, and win prizes. The hackathon at UTD is the second largest hackathon in the US with 1000+ attendees. I organized the event itinerary and guide, allergen menu for the food, and judging setup plans. The hackathon is in November, so fall of 2023.
  • Began leading the Planner team.

Summer 2023: Google internship

Third semester (Fall 2023):

  • HackUTD happened, was one of the busiest times of my life
  • Led the engineering recruiting into the Planner team. The team grew from 3 → 10 members and I was figuring out what it meant to lead at this time. Also did lots of market research and user interviews back then.

Fourth semester (today, Fall 2024):

  • Joined Nova - an autonomous driving lab
  • Writing blog articles in hopes of developing my independent thinking and world knowledge.