I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, and school was always very important to my family. I tried hard to get good grades...mostly to brag to my older brothers. However, I always struggled in one subject - science. From middle school to high school, it was the class I put the most effort into but got the lowest grades, which caused me to lose confidence and to think STEM wasn't for me. But 1 experience changed everything.

I earned a full-tuition scholarship to attend Long Island University and four years later graduated as co-valedictorian with two technical degrees and a minor. This helped me earn an engineering position on a top data science team at Amazon in NYC! But how? I thought STEM wasn't for me? That was until I was introduced to coding for the first time.

In the summer of 2020, while I was in college, a close friend of mine was interning as a software engineer at Snapchat. One evening, he asked if I wanted to learn to code. I shrugged and said, ‘Why not?". With my internship canceled due to COVID, I had nothing else going on. He had just launched a side project on the iOS App Store, so he walked me through building a simple app in Swift. The moment I saw my first lines of code come to life, I was hooked. That single moment reshaped my entire life and career trajectory.

For the rest of the summer, I poured endless hours into online coding courses, and fortunately I was able to add a Data Analytics major for the next semester. STEM no longer intimidated me - I had fallen in love with it.

Amazon was the best job I could have asked for, and I was so lucky to have had the opportunity.I worked on projects I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to tackle during my career. My role quickly progressed as I was promoted twice in 1.5 years, an achievement that typically takes 5 years. However, I was convinced by my best friend from college, Jared, to leave that comfortable and thriving career behind to start Lectec.

The moment that changed everything came late into my educational journey and I was super lucky that I was able to pivot - but sadly many others might not be as lucky. That causes both Jared and I to ask, “What if we had been exposed to STEM in the way we wish we had been introduced to it- years earlier?”. How many others out there had, or better yet, could have had this experience and became an engineer, scientist, or mathematician? That is what drives me to build Lectec with my best friend, and what we are constantly in the pursuit of trying to answer.

Lectec isn’t just a fun project - it is that one experience. The one experience that changed everything for me, and now what we want to give that to the next generation.