I have been the newest person in the room since I was twelve: military school in Rangpur, China at sixteen without the language, then a town of eight thousand in Iowa. Today that is literally my job. As a solutions engineer at Dasseti, I sit between investment teams and due diligence software, translating in both directions.
Roots & Foundations · Early Mathematics & Cricket
Grew up with local mathematics olympiads, notebook physics, and dusty street cricket pitch construction. Formed instincts for probabilistic outcomes and tape-ball bowling variations.
I grew up in Dinajpur in a household where reading was the default answer to boredom. At twelve, I left home for military school at Rangpur Cadet College—66 kilometers away, but a whole different clock. In cadet college, the routine was rigid, the inspections were unforgiving, and you learned quickly to work out how the room operated before opening your mouth.
Cricket was our informal laboratory for probability. We wrapped electrical tape tightly around tennis balls to make them swing in the humid air. Setting field placements when defending small totals on cramped neighborhood grounds taught me the fundamentals of risk asymmetry: you cannot protect every boundary, so you have to calculate where the batter is most likely to make an unforced mistake.
Late nights were spent solving olympiad geometry problems by kerosene lamps during power cuts, cultivating an early affection for formal systems that could be rigorously verified from first principles.
"Before software, cadet college and street cricket taught me that constraints are not limitations—they are the rules that make tactical optimization possible."
At sixteen, my life experienced a sharp turn. I was awarded a full scholarship to attend United World College (UWC) Changshu China, situated on an island in Kuncheng Lake, an hour northwest of Shanghai. I arrived without knowing the language, into dormitories alongside classmates from over a hundred countries.
When you cannot speak the local language, your senses sharpen. You watch how people move, how transactions happen, and how trust is formed. In our economics seminars, we debated whether global capital allocation models could ever be both efficient and fair.
Living in the heart of the Yangtze River Delta during China's high-speed rail and mobile payment explosion made one thing starkly clear: infrastructure determines destiny. The physical and digital systems a society builds dictate what its citizens can imagine. That era laid the foundation for Worldview, an interactive atlas deconstructing how individuals navigate culture, psychology, and ethics.
"Moving to China at sixteen permanently cured me of intellectual parochialism. You quickly learn that every human system is an engineered choice, not a natural law."
My collegiate years brought me to Decorah, Iowa—a town of eight thousand people and long winters—to study Data Science and Mathematics at Luther College.
Junior year came with an honest mix-up: I submitted an application thinking it was for Blackstone, but the interview invitation came back from BlackRock. That fortunate mistake turned into an intensive sequence of apprenticeships:
"A trillion dollars is a spreadsheet problem, a risk problem, and a storytelling problem all at once."
Today, I live in Land O' Lakes, Florida, working remotely as a Solutions Engineer at Dasseti. We build the due diligence software that institutional asset allocators, pensions, and fund managers rely on to evaluate private equity, private credit, and alternative funds. I sit between investment committees and software teams, translating in both directions.
Outside my day job, the habit continues across three notebooks:
"Whether it's defending seven runs in the final over at Waverly or parsing 56,000 SEC adviser filings, the habit remains the same: learn the room, then translate."