About

• I was bilingual by age 2, native in Armenian and Russian. English came next in elementary school, though, like every Armenian, I learned as much of it from the obligatory relatives in the US as from any classroom. Adding a new language every few years became a habit I never shook.
• Gaming entered my life the day my parents brought home a Sega Mega Drive. Sonic the Hedgehog made me a retro gamer by default, which is probably why I still love old games. I beat it cover to cover at 6, then graduated to more modern titles.
• Six was also when my parents threw me into the cold water: regular school and music school at once, with swimming training on top. Time management showed up in my life early, whether I liked it or not.
• At 7 I got my own computer, strictly "for educational purposes." Naturally, the first things on it were games from the internet's shadier corners. It's also the year I met GTA: San Andreas and learned chess, a well-rounded education in strategy and hood tactics.
• It didn't take long before I was prying that machine open too. I've always had a habit of digging into how things work, which mostly meant breaking them and then learning to fix what I broke: reassembling the computer after taking it apart, reinstalling the OS after the latest virus. The skill still comes in handy every time I upgrade my PC or rescue a friend's.
• Entrepreneurship was another early arrival. Ours was one of the few households with stable, unlimited internet, so I started burning games onto discs and reselling them around school, comfortably undercutting the market. The operation ran smoothly until regulators stepped in. Namely, my homeroom teacher.
• Sports were always in the mix. I was already swimming when my uncle, a die-hard karate guy, talked my parents into enrolling me at a dojo. I hated it, but it was useful: the only way out was to pick another sport as an excuse. Enter Space Jam. Bugs Bunny and MJ made me fall for basketball, which opened one of the best chapters of my life, playing on a team with my boys.
• Then came the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies, my first formal taste of the world where media meets technology. I learned to animate in 2D and then 3D, and finally got to play with real robots in robotics, a big step up from the Lego Bionicle and Technic sets I'd grown up building.
• Around the same time, I built my first HTML/CSS website: a gloriously bad tutorial on solving a 3x3 Rubik's cube, written just as I got hooked on cubing myself. While friends chased speedcubing records, I went the other direction, into complexity, working up through the 4x4, 5x5, Megaminx, and beyond.
• My second website actually had a reason to exist: I'd been handed full responsibility for our guinea pig, so I built my own source of truth for keeping it alive. The result was a guinea pig encyclopedia, scraped from a dozen fan sites and a full night of googling "free hosting service." Another horrible website, but I walked away knowing what my classmates didn't, that deploying one isn't dark magic. You're looking at a more recent attempt.
• Around 14, RPGs took over: Skyrim, Fallout, and Dark Souls hit me like an awakening, and I fell hard. After beating them a few times each I started modding, and Skyrim modding became a bit of an unhealthy habit. When I couldn't find a mod for the niche I wanted, I built it myself: player homes, quest tweaks, full mechanics overhauls. Too shy to publish any of them on Nexusmods, but that rabbit hole is where I backed into scripting, and then real programming.
• At 15 and 16, buried in university entrance exam prep, I hit a fork in the road. My family, especially my grandfather (a psychiatrist, the latest in a family line of them), expected me to go into medicine and carry on the tradition. Sorry, grandpa. I asked myself whether I'd rather treat patients or keep playing with technology, and the answer was embarrassingly obvious. That's how I landed at the American University of Armenia, in Computer Science.
• AUA turned into a wild ride. I went from wrestling with algorithms and calculus, to diving deep into cybersecurity and going through the obligatory "hacker" phase, to the moment AI stopped feeling like sci-fi and it clicked that I could actually train a model myself.
• Outside of class, I threw myself into NGO work, mostly with the European Youth Parliament, where I went from participating in international forums to organizing them. It's also where my interdisciplinary streak first showed: I built an Android app for one of the forums. Its user base lasted only as long as the event, but it was my first published app with real users, and I was quietly proud of it.
• AUA wrapped up with Deepchar, my capstone and first real taste of machine learning research. Right around then, winning my first startup competition at 21 pulled me into my first founding experience, TutWiser.
• Then COVID rearranged everything. My career went remote and I put education on pause, since studying online felt like a bad trade. When the tunnel finally showed some light, I tried starting an IoT master's in France, where I picked up French. The degree didn't stick, but the language did. So I applied for a DAAD scholarship, won it, and moved to Germany to study at TUM.
• TUM was a whirlwind: I headed a department in the School of Management's student council, threw myself into clubs, and got deep into the UnternehmerTUM ecosystem, where I wrote my thesis as part of the TUM Entrepreneurial Masterclass, with a paper now on the way. Germany, naturally, added German, which finally brings the language count to five. From there I landed at SAP Fioneer, where I am now.

A lot has happened in between, and even more since, but that's about as far as I'm willing to take the online version. Ask me in person for the rest.