From curiosity to code. The unedited version.
Chess sharpened the habit of thinking several moves ahead. That reflex shows up in every technical problem since.
Tutoring while carrying a full course load. Teaching something is the fastest way to find the gaps in your own understanding.
Serving as Vice President while balancing academics. Community work grounded the ambition and kept the bigger picture in view.
"Curiosity got me here. Discipline kept me going."
SOLVE.
Orthopaedic research internship. Where the instinct surfaced.
The internship was clinical work: patient data, surgical outcomes, research protocols. Precision required. Margin for error, thin.
Nobody asked him to improve the workflows. He just noticed where things were slow and took the initiative to fix them. Automated the repetitive. Freed up time for work that actually needed a human.
That instinct, looking at a system and asking how it could be better, turned out to be the most transferable skill he had. It still is.
GRIND.
Second degree. Different field. Same drive.
Kinesiology and Health Science, finished with honours. But the research years had made one thing undeniable — the modern world runs on software, and he wanted to be someone who could build it.
So he pursued a second degree in Computer Science. Two disciplines that look different on paper but share the same foundation: understand the system deeply, then make it work better.
No clean schedule. Just textbooks, terminals, part-time jobs, and whatever time was left over for side projects.
BMO Place, Dundas Street. Summer 2025. Day one.
Interned as a Junior Software Developer at BMO Financial Group, one of Canada's largest financial institutions. The first real tech offer after years of studying, building, and applying.
The title is junior. The ambition is not. Day one brought imposter syndrome at full volume. Day thirty brought code in production. The gap between those two things is nothing but work.
BUILD.
Back at BMO. Winter 2026. A different version of the same person.
Returning not as someone still finding their footing, but as someone who knows the codebase, the team, and which problems are worth solving.
The title hasn't changed. The learning has. Every sprint is a new system to understand, a new edge case to untangle, a new opportunity to build something better than before.
The story continues…