From my earliest memories, education has been the cornerstone of my life. Born into a family of educators stretching across generations, I naturally gravitated towards the joys of learning and teaching. Significant parts of my childhood were spent helping my friends with homework or preparing for exams together. This passion for sharing knowledge continued through to college where I took up the position of a tutor at the College of Computing. I didn't realise it until recently but sharing the joy of learning was something that gives me utmost happiness. After my undergraduate degree in Computer Science I returned to India with a view to work in education. I wanted to work at the grassroots level to understand the challenges that children from marginalised populations face. I volunteered at five non-profits over the course of six months but something always felt amiss. I spent sometime reflecting on my own experiences and realised that the spaces where I thrived in - whether it was in my Montessori based kindergarten or college at Georgia Tech - were spaces that gave me agency as a learner. A few weeks into this realisation I met likeminded individuals and we decided that the fastest way to learn and understand better would be to start our own learning space. We identified a community and found a space to set up a learning center. In two weeks we had two hundred children visiting the space. We were overwhelmed by the response from the community and we realised how fast we needed to adapt to keep up with the growing need. In this evolving journey, we immersed ourselves in continual learning, practical application, and reflection, drawing inspiration from Paulo Freire's 'praxis' approach. Our learnings came thick and fast. We realised very quickly that seeing education in isolation is not a viable way to ensure progress. We created a systems map, to understand all the challenges faced in the community and understood how they came together. We identified where we could act to create virtuous cycles in the community. A lot of children that visited the space had experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences. They needed spaces with healthy adult relationships to cope with the trauma and build resilience. We made our spaces more trauma informed and changed the design of the space adding a 'Peace Room' where children can take a time out when they're distressed. When we learned that many children felt too unclean to participate in the learning space we worked with the community to ensure water supply at our learning center so children could clean up and join the learning. The biggest learning though came when I read John Holt - "Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense". Most children simply did not know what it meant to know something. To them the universe was just a bunch of arbitrary rules that the adults shared. If we could just help children believe that they could understand and learn something they could then confidently explore the world. Taking inputs from the learners and the adults in the community we developed learning material particularly in Mathematics, grounding the subject in the experiences that the children had. Though we had not developed any specific assessment mechanisms we had documented "A Before and After" narrative of each child and we knew that our space was thriving. It was at this point that the pandemic hit and we were forced to rethink our model and pause our experiments. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to reflect and I wanted to try and create similar unstructured, self exploratory, learning spaces digitally as well. With a co-founder I launched Crater Club - a live streaming platform for designers, educators, software developers and stock traders. After raising a seed round of 1 million USD, we created a community of 100,000 users and we studied how people could learn by being a part of live streams where creators went about their day to day work. While we could not raise further funding and unfortunately had to shut down the company, Crater gave me a glimpse of the power of technology at scale and got me thinking how I could apply technology to other learning spaces. Post the pandemic we expanded to five learning spaces serving the needs of communities that were badly affected. It was at this point that the processes, experiments and methodologies that we had been following so far stopped being so effective. Despite our best efforts, a large amount of time was spent putting out fires and solving administrative issues. The in depth efforts we had put into our first community were simply not replicable given our resources and there became a need for developing a better methodology. It is here that I came across the work of Dr. Brigid Barron's with YouthLab and how technology can be used to create more equitable opportunities. I also read Dr. Denise Pope's book "Doing School" and learnt how we can capture qualitatively children's experiences. Experimenting with my own initiative and working in the grassroots has given me a lot of perspective and has given me an appreciation of the challenges that marginalised communities are facing but today I feel that rather than working in a silo I would love to work as a part of a team with the right mentorship and guidance. Having stood on the shoulders of many individuals whose work helped me find my way, I now aim to create a body of work from which others can also learn. Throughout my life I have been working on technology or education and I believe that I can synthesise my learnings from both these worlds and create effective processes and methods. Stanford to me seems like the ideal place to marry these two worlds and provide me with the best environment and community to enable me to thrive.