Growing up across countries meant learning early that you either adapt or fall behind. By the time I arrived at the University of Alberta in 2022, starting over had become familiar. I got involved, met people, and slowly started to understand how things worked and where I could be useful.
 

I don't think I'm someone who was born knowing exactly what they wanted to do. I'm someone who kept saying yes to things that seemed interesting and ended up somewhere I never could have planned.
 

What I've picked up along the way, from engineering labs and semiconductor research on one side and student governance and institutional leadership on the other, is that the technical and the human parts of any problem are almost never as separate as they first appear. The engineering work taught me rigour and how to think about systems. The governance work taught me that systems are run by people, and people are complicated, and that's where most of the real work actually happens.
 

I certainly don't have all the answers. But I think I ask better questions than I used to, I listen more carefully than I once did, and I care genuinely about getting things right, not just getting them done.