I was born in Brooklyn, but by the time I was five, my family had moved to Austin, Texas, and that's where I grew up.

From middle school, I was watching markets. Not because anyone told me to, but because I found it interesting. How businesses worked, how money moved, why some companies compounded and others didn't. It felt like a puzzle I actually wanted to solve.

When it came time to choose a direction in college, I ran through the usual options. Medicine, engineering, computer science. None of them fit. Business always had my attention, and within business, finance was the clear answer. I was math-minded, markets-obsessed, and drawn to understanding how companies generate and allocate capital.

The Data Science addition came through UIUC's Finance + Data Science program at Gies College of Business. The fit was immediate. Everything in finance is numbers. Data is in everything. The combination of quantitative rigor and market intuition felt exactly right.

I arrived at UIUC not knowing a single person. Coming from Texas, Illinois was a new world. That was the point: a new chapter, and a decision to make the most of it.

I joined EntreCorps, a student consulting organization originating from Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship at Gies College of Business, embedded in the entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem in Illinois since 2013. With over 230 projects across 20+ industries and 1,300+ consultants through the program, it's one of the most impactful student organizations at UIUC. I worked across multiple client engagements and grew into a leadership role on the Executive Board.

The summer after freshman year, I started going deep on wealth management: how to build and protect wealth intelligently. That research pulled me into digital assets, and specifically into tokenization. Understanding the structural limitations of traditional finance (settlement inefficiencies, access barriers, liquidity constraints) and seeing how blockchain infrastructure begins to solve those problems, I became obsessed. I've followed companies like Ondo Finance closely ever since.

Since then, I've been doing educational consulting in the crypto and digital assets realm, helping people better understand the space and how it fits into their personal finances. This passion for personal finance education also led me to grow into a leadership role on the Executive Board of the Personal Finance Club at UIUC.

Over the last year, I've grown into the ventures and startup world more deliberately. Taking on greater responsibility at EntreCorps gave me that foundation. From there, I began working with AxeaGroup, a global PE advisory firm with a focused thesis in O&G investment advisory, working on deals and helping operationally revamp the firm.

That work confirmed what I started to believe: I want to be building companies, scaling them, working with people I believe in. Building into this belief, I got the opportunity to join Moneta Ventures in Los Angeles as a Summer Analyst. Moneta is a VC firm with a B2B SaaS thesis and $360M AUM. I'll be connecting with founders, sourcing deals, analyzing the portfolio, and contributing to the overall mission of helping founders scale the next generation of tech.

This is where I am. Eager to keep building every day, connecting with founders, working on startups, and helping early-stage companies scale.