How I Got Here

A few highlights from the journey so far. Pick a year.

2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026

2020 · Kigali

Covid shifted schools online. Oddly, that's where it started.

2020 · Camp
Rwanda's first national maths camp, online — I did well enough in the selections to get into Rwanda’s first online national maths camp.

The year I started entering things — and occasionally placing.

March 2021 · Pi Day
6th, Rwanda Mathematics Competition — The national Pi Day competition. Sixth, which felt enormous at the time.
July 2021 · Wits
Bronze, Wits Mathematics Competition — Wits runs it out of South Africa. My first medal outside Rwanda.
2021 · UWaterloo CEMC
Certificate of Distinction, Euclid Contest — Waterloo’s contest. Top 20% worldwide, and I managed it again the year after.

The olympiad year, and then straight into coaching the year below.

April 2022 · Selection
Top six in Rwanda — The selection round. Six of us went through to represent the country. Only 2 of us represented Rwanda in both PAMO and IMO.
June 2022 · PAMO
Honourable Mention, Pan-African Mathematical Olympiad — Managed to Honourable mention in Ben Geurir, Morocco. PAMO record
July 2022 · IMO
International Mathematical Olympiad — Managed to score many points in Oslo, Norway which was not a norm in my country. IMO record
Aug 2022 · Coaching
Started coaching nationally — I started coaching the year below — problem selection for the national olympiad, and PAMO coordination over at AIMS.

New continent, new subject, and my first real program.

Aug 2023 · CMU-Q
Arrived at Carnegie Mellon — Entered as Business student and later switched to Computer Science, with Mathematical Sciences and Business Administration on the side. The plan was to keep the maths without closing doors.
Fall 2023 · 15-112
Rubik's Cube, and a first award — My first thing built from scratch — a cube you can actually turn, faked into 3D. It won the term prize for interface design.

My first proper engineering job, and the year I started teaching.

May – Aug 2024 · Eclipse
Open-source contributor, Eclipse Foundation — Working on TriagerX for Eclipse Adoptium, alongside engineers from IBM, Red Hat and Microsoft. It ended up winning IBM CAS Project of the Year.
Aug 2024 · Teaching
Became an undergraduate TA — Accounting and Calculus II to begin with. Nothing catches a shaky understanding quicker than having to explain it.

The busiest one. A hackathon, two jobs over the summer, and a fellowship.

Spring 2025 · Lifelines
Reconnect — 13th place — A platform for finding missing people and things, built over a weekend at Lifelines. In my worst semester, naturally.
Mar – Jul 2025 · Service
Trainer, African Olympiad Academy — Teaching geometry and combinatorics to secondary students across the continent.
May – Jul 2025 · Mexico
Software Engineer Intern, Infra del Sur — Data pipelines, a small desktop tool, and a lot of test automation. My first time working somewhere that wasn’t a university.
May – Aug 2025 · QCRI
Summer Research Intern, Qatar Computing Research Institute — Building causal graphs out of interview transcripts using a set of LLM agents. I presented it as a poster at the closing ceremony.
Nov 2025 · QRDI
Research fellowship awarded — Funded work with Prof. Hasan Demirkoparan and my classmate Anurag Aryal on making solvers for boundary value problems better.

A term in Pittsburgh, then two courses to teach in the fall.

Spring 2026 · Study abroad
Semester in Pittsburgh — A term on the main campus. Took some cool classes like a beginner piano, which is going less well.
Summer 2026 · Teaching
TA, Applied Software Engineering — Teaching 99-520 — the same course that put me on an open-source team two years earlier.
Fall 2026 · Teaching
TA for 15-122 and 15-451 — Imperative Computation and Algorithm Design, both in the same term. Senior year starts here.