Why did you choose to study at WPI?  

WPI has a very flexible course selection system that allows you to enroll in advanced courses without necessarily taking all the introductory courses (i.e. if you believe you are ready take 'applied statistics II,' you will be allowed to do so, even if you didn't take 'applied statistics I'), which is very helpful for impatient overachievers and ambitious students. Due to this system, I was able to take most of the toughest courses required by my major (and even a graduate course) during my sophomore year, while still maintaining a good GPA. 

Travelling to work on a project in another country (WPI's Interactive Qualifying Project aka IQP) also sounded like something I would enjoy a lot since it is a great opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and become immersed in a different culture. It’s an amazing opportunity to explore a bit more of our planet and provide meaningful impact in a community. 

How are you involved with the WPI community?  

I’m actively engaged in WPI’s international community as philanthropy chair for the Brazilian Student Association (BRASA) and as an active member of both the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the International Student Council (ISC). I have also represented WPI at hackathons at Harvard University and won one of the competitions. As part of a team, I organized conferences at Harvard and MIT with 1100+ attendees that raised $650,000+ from sponsors. These efforts build bridges with peer institutions and increase WPI’s visibility through delivering great work and building extraordinary things. 

What’s your favorite thing about WPI?  

I love that everyone is obsessed with what they do and how committed they are to delivering great quality work. This inspires me to always push harder in my efforts to explore the frontiers of technology. 

Do you have a faculty or staff mentor?  

Professor Randy Paffenroth and Professor Xiaozhong Liu have been very important for my academic trajectory at WPI. In addition to being world-class scholars in their fields, they both seem to understand me and have given me very helpful advice. Professor Paffenroth’s work bridges compressed sensing, signal processing, and machine learning for engineering problems, and Professor Liu’s research spans natural language processing, information retrieval, and text/graph mining. Their mentorship has pushed me to pair mathematical rigor with real-world impact and to set a higher bar for my own work. Both were also very receptive to meeting outside class time and scheduled office hours to discuss technical ideas and provide me with some guidance, which has been very helpful during my time at WPI. 

How has WPI’s project-based learning influenced your education? 

Project-based learning at WPI helped me get into the mindset of a “tinkerer.” I developed high agency and became action-oriented by looking at challenges in a pragmatic way by defining the real problem, cutting the scope to what matters, building, testing, and iterating. Working in high-stakes, ambiguous settings made me comfortable breaking big problems into smaller chunks. It also sharpened my obsession for solving even harder problems that led me to start my own startup that aims to shrink the gap between real and virtual leveraging of AI (artificial intelligence) and AR (augmented reality) technology.