Year-in-Review
Silicon Valley trip with the Center of Entrepreneurship, Venture Lab accelerator with PhizzIO, and first co-op at Phillips Edison — a year of solidifying direction in AI and startups.
Just when I thought my freshman year had been hard to top, sophomore year turned out even better. It was full of experiences that pushed my personal, academic, and professional growth, and a few of them genuinely changed where I saw myself heading.
The most impactful was the trip to San Francisco with the Center for Entrepreneurship and the College of Engineering and Applied Science. As a computer science student, visiting Silicon Valley was a dream. We visited companies like IDEO, Notion, Google, and Apple, and I got to talk with AI engineers and software developers about where the field was headed. Those conversations did more than anything else to focus my interest in AI and give me a clearer sense of the path I wanted.
San Francisco itself stuck with me. Walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, designed by UC alumnus Joseph Strauss, was oddly moving — a real reminder that hard work can actually lead somewhere big. I came back more motivated than I'd left.
Another big one was the Venture Lab accelerator at the 1819 Innovation Hub. I'd been building a startup focused on making physical therapy more accessible and helping patients actually stick with it, and the program threw me into the deep end of what it takes to launch and run a company. The part on customer discovery stuck with me most, because it forced me to really understand what customers needed instead of assuming. I picked up the practical skills too, from market research to pitching, and came out more sure than ever that I wanted to keep building PhizzIO.
My first internship, a co-op at Phillips Edison and Company, was where a lot of this came together. It was my first time applying what I'd learned in an actual job, and it gave me a much better sense of how the industry works. Between the projects, the people I worked with, and just figuring out a corporate environment, I built skills I couldn't get in a classroom and got clearer on what I wanted. It confirmed I wanted to be in tech, and narrowed down what I might specialize in after graduation.
Looking ahead, I've got some ambitious goals. I want to push PhizzIO forward by growing the team and building a working product we can actually test clinically, which means a lot of development, testing, and refining to make sure it really helps physical therapy patients. I also want to go deeper into machine learning and AI, which have pulled at me for a while. I plan to take more advanced courses and land an internship focused on machine learning, since nothing beats hands-on experience for turning theory into something useful.
More than anything, this year gave my goals a clear direction. It showed me what hard work and genuine curiosity can add up to, and I'm excited to keep building on it and to do work that actually matters in AI and physical therapy.
