A Sensational September
Brightens my day to see you here!
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -Mahatma Gandhi
What is up guys?! It's your boy, Arjun Virk, a 15 y/o innovator, researcher, entrepreneur, public speaker, healthcare enthusiast, and STEM advocate back with another newsletter! Welcome aboard 👋. These newsletters will be a quick recap of all of the exciting things that happened in this month and insights I’ve gained that I think will add value to you.
Beginning Innovate at The Knowledge Society 🔥
The highlight of this month was hands down was starting Innovate at The Knowledge Society.
On March 22nd, 2023, at the end of the school day, I received an email from a program called TKS. The email was my acceptance letter to their program, one I have been trying to get into for months at this point had finally arrived. After submitting a freaking AI-powered garbage bin for my financial aid project ($3500 scholarship), I was finally enrolled.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock , you probably already know what the heck TKS is. But for those who don’t, TKS is the world’s top human accelerator for teens that receive olympic level training in emerging technologies and lifestyle. It’s a program that produces “Unicorn students” 🦄.
In the brief span of just four sessions this September, TKS has been nothing short of transformative. It has exposed me to high-level introductory modules on cutting-edge technologies such as AI and the Metaverse, facilitated connections with like-minded peers who share my interests, and instilled in me a passion for driving impactful change in the world. My growth in these few sessions has been exponential 📈. Here are my main takeaways from the sessions and coaching calls with my director:
“In order to achieve unconventional success, you must take an unconventional path” - Nadeem Nathoo
Don’t take the standard path of trying to become the best like everyone else.
In order to take the unconventional path, you must:
Surround yourself with people doing different things
Read things that are not handed to you
QUESTION EVERYTHING
Willingness to take on healthy risk
Recipe to being in the top 0.1% of the population:
Have good character
Have a good network, and knowledge and skills
99.9% of people are just taking a conventional path
How you prepare is how you will perform - HUGE
Failure is a stepping stone… don’t be afraid and instead embrace it and learn from the mistakes you made to grow
In order to make the most impact in your field, you must LOVE what you do
Content Creation (like this newsletter) not only help you grow and teach you to express your learnings in a creative manner, but are a major contributor in getting the attention of smart people.
This one’s easier said than done: Don’t compete against others, just compete against yourself
The program thus far has blown my expectations away. I’ve had the chance to meet so many people that are working in the same areas as me like Prabhdeep Singh and Achilles Katsos who are working on projects for Hackathons with me. In addition, the directors are nothing like traditional school teachers. They provide so much feedback without any fluff; just straight up and to the point. They are the one’s that showed me what High Standards looks like and are constantly laser focused on my growth. When nobody stands with me, they do. Huge shoutout to
for being an awesome director for Cohort 9!In fact, I was so hyped after kickoff that I decided to direct my energy into a LinkedIn post with a tiny review of the session…. it got noticed by the founders of TKS and Aatik 👀. Check out the full post here.
In October I will be starting my focus in AI, but, directed on Cancer. The goal here is to point my Replicates and Create project in the area of cancer and AI: two fields I’m passionate about. Here are a list of the explore modules (high-level exposure to emerging tech) I have completed:
Artificial Intelligence
Regenerative Medicine
Philosophy of Happiness
Gene Editing
Cancer
I’ll also be competing in my first Hackathon (The Explore Hackathon) with students in my TKS Cohort next month. I’m really excited to see what comes next with my experience at TKS; I know it’ll be nothing short of last month.
Growing Everyone STEM 🔬
With a couple of hardworking and close friends in June of 2023, we founded a non-profit organization called Everyone STEM 🤝. For some context, our mission at Everyone STEM (an official 501 (c) (3) non-profit) is to provide STEM Education through courses, workshops, and speaking events to communities that are underserved or underrepresented in the field (BIPOC, Indigenous, women) 💪. Our resources are made to be accessible to anyone, at no cost, and for FREE. You can check out more info about the organization here.
This month, we smashed many of our goals and are on track to have a successful Q4. In addition, our team grew to 40 passionate high school students from 11 countries and we were able to secure 10 partnerships with 9 student-run organizations and 1 non-student affiliate Easy Digi! Huge Shoutout to Hemit Patel for creating our very own classroom tool for our STEM courses.
Going forward, we’re going to be laser focused on producing our extensive curriculum in areas like Computer Science and Chemistry and building more awesome products just like our classroom. We’ll also be starting a new project which aims at giving TED-like talks to students at their schools, so stay tuned to see some that we do!
Starting Grade 11 🤯
After a long and refreshing summer break, I finally started Grade 11. Compared to all of most classmates, I was actually really excited to start this new school year and it has been going really well so far. Apart from my packed semester with AP Biology, Chemistry, French and Functions/Advanced Functions, I’ve been thriving in the post-covid school environment. When the academic load began to feel a bit overwhelming, I decided to incooperate some fun back into my life by joining my school's badminton and table tennis teams 😅. I’m heading 3 clubs at my school: Coding 🧑🏽💻, TED ED 🗣, and STEM Club 👨🏽🔬 which open the opportunity to spread my knowledge to others in a really fun way…. something school can’t do. I will be exposing students to AP CSP Curriculum, AI LLM Models, web development, problem solving, and public speaking skills. I am also aiming to bring in guest speakers to our Coding Club from top companies like Google and Microsoft this year. Be sure to read my future newsletter to see some insights and takeaways from these talks!
Building Cognitive Classrooms with The Junior New York Academy of Sciences 💻
Earlier this month, I began my first team-based research project as a participant in the Junior Academy at the New York Academy of Sciences 🔭. My team comprises of students from around the world building an AI-investment app for the Cognitive Classrooms category 🤖. I can’t give too much away right now, but I’ll share the results of the project in a future newsletter, so stay tuned! I’m really excited for this project as I’ll finally learn some advanced Machine Learning techniques from expert students in the field and create my first AI-powered app 📲.
Want to check out more about the Junior Academy, click here. See our project canvas here.
Insightful Content to Check Out
Atomic Habits by James Clear ⚛
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight 👟
Vinod Khosla at All-in-Summit 2023 🤖
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 🪶
Machine Learning: Living in the Age of AI by WIRED 📹
PotM 🧮
Source: CEMC at the University of Waterloo
Check out the solution when it comes out here.
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ARJUN!! This newsletter was actually on another level of amazing. Your incorporation of the different elements (quote at the beginning, emojis, headers, visuals) was seamless! You definitely gave it your personal touch: I could feel your personality all throughout. The problem, resources, and joke you added at the end were so engaging!! I *loved* them. On a final note, not only was the organization and wording amazing, but the content itself. You should be hella proud.