My personal and professional journey across contexts and countries, in building educational non-profits and digital technologies is founded on the idea that compassion is an innate individual capacity that can be nurtured and fortified through well-designed collaboration-enhancing learning environments. It is this idea that I hope to carry forward and contribute to with my doctoral studies, informing my decision to apply to Stanford GSE’s PhD in Education, specializing in the Developmental and Psychological Sciences (DAPS) study area and exploring its intersection with technology through the Learning Sciences and Technology Design (LSTD) program.  In the last five years, I’ve established after-school spaces where children can realize their highest potential and stimulate their intrinsic empathetic capacity through the Vismaya Kalike non-profit initiative that I co-founded. This initiative was borne out of a dissatisfaction with my experiences as a volunteer at five other educational non-profits that lacked institutional processes which encouraged agency, conditions that I was exposed to through my Montessori schooling and undergraduate engineering education. The learning center was intended to be a joyful and democratic space where nearly 200 children were encouraged to co-create the space with the coordinators to instil values of collective ownership and responsibility and draw out the best versions of themselves.  As the initiative scaled,  Paulo Freire's 'praxis' approach was instrumental in helping me adapt to the overwhelming community response to the initiative through continual learning, practical application, and reflection. I used systems thinking to uncover other often neglected elements in the environment that influenced education and learning including challenges in the community and their interactions with each other. Researching these system components and their interconnectedness helped me identify interventions that would create virtuous cycles in the community. Key to the establishment of these positively reinforcing cycles was that I learned the challenges and the value of different interventions as I tried to address the specific issues that accompanied the aftereffects of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) that these children were subject to. I conducted extensive research with the non-profit team through interviews with parents, teachers, and volunteers to design trauma-sensitive and inclusive spaces, including the allocation of a “Peace Room” (where children took time in distress), the institution of sharing circles (to encourage mutual emotional support) and access to water supply (for children who felt psychologically unclean to interact).  My biggest learning came from continuous observation of children and identifying that they made sense of their universe through norms imposed by adults and feared learning which stood in opposition to John Holt’s idea that "Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense". We studied Prof. Mitchell Resnick's work and created self-evaluative learning material with sufficient scaffolding allowing the children to explore independently and build their own knowledge of the world uninfluenced by community and cultural norms. Based on interviews with parents, teachers and children, the intervention was a success and it made me curious what other assessment mechanisms could help us measure intervention effectiveness.  A core research interest that emerged from my experiences is understanding the construction of educational spaces where knowledge acquisition and learning are deeply intertwined with collaboration and co-creation as core tenets. Particularly, I want to study the processes that enable the participation of children with ACE in the design of their learning environment and help them cultivate agency and empathy. Furthermore, I am concerned about ensuring the replicability of the positive outcomes generated by these interventions at scale and over time and understanding the conditions under which external shocks can disrupt stable reinforcing processes for vulnerable populations of children.  Despite expanding to five learning spaces to serve severely affected communities, I saw previously successful processes and systems become significantly less effective as we were riddled with operational and administrative issues. As an education researcher, it is critical for me to evaluate the robustness of our learning models to environmental shocks as the pandemic forced a pause on our research and intervention design and to understand different methodologies following a failure to replicate results with our initial community. The pandemic also pivoted me towards the potential of digital technologies to create unstructured, self-exploratory, learning virtual spaces similar to our brick-and-mortar establishment. While parallelly working on this virtual transformation for children, I co-founded CraterClub, a live streaming platform for designers, developers and stock traders, with a million-dollar seed funding that allowed us to study learning patterns among people who were a part of live streams by creators going about their day. ________What was your one big insight from learning perspective?________. Although CraterClub's journey ended due to funding limitations, the data collected from the 100,000-user community gave me insights into the power of technology at scale. This experience inspires me to explore through research how technology can be applied in various learning spaces, specifically ones that deal with vulnerable children who have low and inequitable access to resources.  Experimenting with my own initiative and working at the grassroots level has given me a lot of perspective, a glimpse into the difficulties of research and an appreciation of the challenges that marginalised communities are facing. I find myself very inspired by Prof. Brigid Barron's with YouthLab and the investigation of technology as a means to create more equitable opportunities is aligned with my research agenda. Some of my past work on how to capture children's experiences qualitatively has also been informed by Prof. Denise Pope's book "Doing School". Stanford GSE’s program and faculty group are particularly well-positioned to provide me with rigorous theoretical and methodological training to help me achieve my research goals and build a body of work that contributes both to the knowledge of the field and its implementation in practice. Thus far my work has always been in two different worlds either as a developer-entrepreneur working on technology or as a teacher-facilitator working in education. As I have juggled multiple roles in practice, I have felt extremely fulfilled in the contributions I could make. I am eager to learn how my role as an academic researcher can elevate the design and effectiveness of processes and methods targeted at children facing trauma in developing economy contexts. My experiences give me the advantage of identifying the unique challenges of the many different stakeholders who participate in the construction and maintenance of learning environments and richly populate the space of questions I could seek answers to. While these experiences have given me a distinctive perspective, I want to synthesise my learnings and I believe that the Stanford GSE is very well-suited to marry these two worlds. I hope that working in this research group will provide me with the right guidance to develop processes and create environments where every learner can craft their own learning journey to be the best versions of themselves. I hope you find my application worthy of admission into Stanford GSE's doctoral program in Education.