Before I arrived, the UAE existed in my mind mostly as an image constructed by headlines and other people's accounts. I had opinions about it without having earned them. Going to NYU Abu Dhabi was, in part, an attempt to correct that. I wanted to be somewhere unfamiliar enough that I couldn't rely on what I thought I already knew.

What I didn't expect was how much that unfamiliarity would teach me about myself. When severe flooding hit the region, I found myself joining local relief efforts, and I remember feeling the weight of something I had only ever read about before. Climate change stopped being an abstract concern and became something I could see and respond to. The smaller adjustments of daily life abroad, navigating transit, handling bureaucracy in a foreign system, building a routine from scratch, added up in ways I'm still making sense of.

The friendships I formed there are some of the most meaningful I have. Living alongside people from so many different backgrounds shifted something in how I understand my own. I came back viewing my home country differently, not worse or better, just more clearly, the way you see a room differently after spending time outside of it.

My summer in Vietnam changed the way I think about sustainability and the kind of work it requires. At VinUni, I collaborated with Vietnamese students on a Digital Twin project focused on Hanoi’s urban infrastructure, where we built agent-based simulations to better understand traffic congestion, pollution, and energy efficiency. What began as a technical project quickly became something more grounded. The work was strongest when it reflected local perspective, not just the logic of the model.

Just as meaningful was the experience of working across cultural and language differences. There were moments when communication was difficult, and we had to rely on Google Translate, gestures, and visual demonstrations to move forward. Rather than making the collaboration weaker, those challenges made it more intentional. They taught me patience, adaptability, and the importance of meeting people halfway. I left Vietnam with a deeper appreciation for community-driven solutions and a clearer understanding that global sustainability efforts are only meaningful when they are shaped by the people most connected to them.

During my J-term in South Korea, I studied sustainability-first development and saw firsthand how culture, innovation, and community shape the country’s approach to progress. The program combined academic lessons with experiential learning, allowing me to connect big-picture sustainability concepts with real-world examples.

One highlight was meeting with the president of Dong Wha, where we learned about the creation of Whal Myung Su, a traditional drink rooted in wellness and cultural heritage. What stood out most was the company’s philanthropic mission, showing how business can prioritize giving back to the community while preserving tradition. We also visited incubator companies, where I learned about their unique missions, organizational structures, and the ways they foster collaborative work environments and strong communities.

Beyond these visits, I immersed myself in South Korea’s culture exploring vibrant neighborhoods of Seoul, sharing meals, and engaging with peers. This balance of academic exploration and cultural immersion gave me a broader perspective on sustainability, teaching me that meaningful progress depends not only on technical solutions but also on the values and relationships that guide them.

At the NYU Tandon hAQathon, I took on a lead role in developing Quasar, a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network designed to classify recyclables into five categories. Working with my team, I used quantum computing, Python, Pennylane, and TensorFlow to explore how quantum machine learning could be applied to a real sustainability problem. What drew me to the project was not just the technical challenge, but the chance to work at the edge of something new while still keeping it tied to a practical goal.

What made the experience meaningful was seeing that the project was not only interesting in theory. When we compared our QCNN to a classical CNN under the same parameters, we saw improvements in accuracy, training time, testing time, and model size. That made the work feel bigger than a competition project. It showed me how emerging technologies can be used in ways that are both innovative and grounded, especially when they are aimed at problems like sustainability and resource use.

 At NYU Hack Dibner, I led Team AKPN in designing a tool that could attach to library chairs and use vibrating sensors to remind students to stand up, stretch, and take breaks during long study sessions. The project came from a simple observation: students often stay seated for hours at a time, even when they know it is not good for them. We wanted to create something small and practical that could gently interrupt that pattern and encourage healthier habits.

What I liked about the project was that it focused on a problem people often overlook because it feels so normal. Long hours of sitting, fatigue, and burnout are built into student life in ways that are easy to accept without questioning. This tool was our attempt to make well-being part of the study environment itself. Leading the project taught me a lot about building around everyday behavior and showed me that even simple engineering ideas can have real value when they respond to how people actually live and work.

ChironVR was built around a question that felt both technical and bigger than the hardware itself: if haptic feedback matters in surgical training, how much of that value can still be preserved when cost is treated as a real design constraint. Most high-fidelity haptic systems are expensive enough that many training programs cannot realistically access them, which means the issue is not only about performance, but about who gets the opportunity to train with touch at all. The goal of the project was to design a low-cost VR haptic glove that could still create meaningful tactile feedback, even if it did not match the fidelity of commercial systems.

What made the project meaningful to me was that it turned affordability into the center of the engineering problem rather than something to think about afterward. Using consumer-grade components, servo-driven force feedback, potentiometers, and an ESP32, we built and refined the glove through multiple prototype iterations, always returning to the same question of whether the feedback was coherent enough to actually change the training experience. In the end, the project showed that lower-cost design does not have to mean no value. Even under strong cost limits, the glove was able to preserve enough haptic feedback to make interaction feel more grounded and deliberate, which is what made the work feel important beyond the device itself.