Volunteer Mentor & Judge

Mentored and judged projects at WildHacks, Northwestern's hackathon. Spent the weekend helping students get unstuck on everything from React state bugs to API auth issues as they tried to go from idea to working prototype in about 24 hours. Hackathons meant a lot to me when I was starting out, so it was cool to be on the other side of that for once.

Speaker & Demo Presenter

Gave a talk and live demo at AI Tinkerers Chicago about Marketmon, a project I built with Chris Tague and Kyle Goben for Anthropic's Build With Claude Developer Challenge. Marketmon generates trading cards based on S&P 500 companies, with stats pulled from real financial data. The demo walked through meta prompting — using one model to write better prompts for another — JSON prefill with the Claude API to get structured responses, and feeding real-world data as context to improve AI output.

Featured Speaker

Gave a featured talk at ChiPy's March 2025 main meeting called "Decoding 'Fedspeak' With Python." The idea was to use ML and NLP to predict Fed interest rate decisions by analyzing FOMC statements and meeting minutes. Built a TensorFlow neural network that outperformed a linear regression baseline at classifying rate actions (raise, lower, or hold) from the deliberately vague language the Fed uses. The whole pipeline, TF-IDF vectorization, stop-word removal, sentiment scoring, and model training, came in under 200 lines of Python. Watch the talk on YouTube.

Workshop Leader

• Ran a React workshop where participants built a simple web app from scratch
• Ran an intro machine learning workshop with a hands-on Python lab

Technology & Financial Sector Leader, Previous Technology Sector Analyst

• Ran the tech sector analyst team for 3 semesters, managing over $40,000 in assets
• Pitched and presented on companies like Intel, Qualcomm, and Applied Materials
• Covered macro trends across tech and financial services

Member

• Got in as a freshman, which was uncommon. The club focused on investment banking, private equity, and related fields.
• Learned a lot about high finance through the club's talks and discussions.

Member

• Competed in the club's programming contest and got others to sign up too
• Went to workshops on things like React and other tech topics

Participant

Flew out to San Francisco to compete in the Vercel x Nvidia World's Shortest Hackathon.

1st Place

Won first place with Connor Flint at the MCP Hackathon, hosted by Drive Capital and LiquidMetal AI. We built "SwimSmart", a site that pulls live sensor data from Chicago's public data portal to show beach closures and water conditions. Chicago's existing system is manually updated and often wrong, so we wanted something better. We found real complaints about it on Reddit, then built a working prototype with Astro and OpenStreetMap in a few hours.

Winner

My team submitted "Marketmon" to the Build With Claude Developer Challenge, a hackathon for projects using the Claude API. Marketmon is a turn-based trading card game where you battle creatures based on S&P 500 companies. We built it with SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, and the Claude API.

Finalist

My team built KnowWho, an internal tool to help new hires find people with specific domain knowledge (like Data Analytics) or experience with particular technologies (like Rust, NLTK, or Pandas). It pulled from internal enterprise GitHub data to surface who knows what, so instead of asking around for weeks, new engineers could get up to speed on who to talk to right away.

Best Game Development Hack

Built "Marketmon" at BlossomHack, a turn-based trading card game where creatures are based on S&P 500 companies. Used SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, and the Claude API.

3rd Place - Fidelity Challenge

Three other Iowa State students and I drove eleven hours to Dallas for HackUTD X. We built "FinTeach", a Flutter mobile app that teaches personal finance through a level-based game. The idea was to make financial literacy more accessible, especially for students at underfunded schools that don't offer it.

2nd Place

We built "Agrepair" at HackIowaState v2, a web app that connects equipment owners with contractors for repair services. Built with NextJS, TailwindCSS, Supabase, and Vercel. The idea came from how annoying it is to find the right repair person for specialized equipment, especially in agriculture.

Best Insurance Hack

We built "InsuriQuest," an app that tries to make insurance less confusing. The interesting part was a decision tree generation system that created branching user stories on the fly, which kept LLM API calls to a minimum.

3rd Place

Undergrad stock pitch competition judged by industry professionals. Our team pitched Fulgent Genetics, running a DCF, comps, and precedent transactions to build our valuation. Placed 3rd.

Participant

Competed in "Prosperity," IMC Trading's global trading competition. Over 10 days, teams wrote Python strategies to trade on a virtual market. Basically an algorithmic trading challenge where you're trying to optimize returns for your assigned island.

1st Place

Won first place in the 2023 CFA Institute Research Challenge for Iowa. We were assigned Sun Country Airlines ($SNCY) and built a valuation using public comps and a DCF with sensitivity testing. Had a faculty advisor and an industry mentor guiding us through the research and presentation process.

2nd Place

We built "dungeon_ai," a web app that acts as an AI Dungeon Master so you can play D&D-style games without needing an experienced DM. You create a character, allocate skill points, and the AI generates the storyline, environments, and player character images as you go. Got second place.

3rd Place

Three hours to solve as many Kattis programming puzzles as we could. We placed third.

2nd Place

We built a Discord bot for financial education using Python, Firebase, NLTK, and the QuickChart API. It could answer finance questions and generate charts on the fly.