// 4.0 GPA. Reinforcement learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Scala DSL that became the ancestor of Clause.
Came to UIC for the depth. Graduated with a 4.0 GPA in May 2023.
Relevant coursework: Reinforcement Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Object-Oriented Languages & Environments. The OO Languages course was where things clicked — building a Scala DSL from scratch that supported set operations, classes, interfaces, inheritance, dynamic dispatch, and partial evaluation. A complete language semantics exercise from scratch.
That DSL is the direct ancestor of Clause. The same questions about evaluation order, what "meaning" means in a formal system, and how to design a language that feels inevitable rather than arbitrary — those questions are still alive in the current work.
Also: an RL research project improving policy-gradient algorithms for stock trading, achieving ~30% better profits on real trading data vs. baseline. And distributed systems work in Scala — gRPC + Akka HTTP + AWS Lambda + Hadoop MapReduce — that rewired how I think about scale.
The academic environment gave permission to go slow and go deep. Every project started from first principles.