I was born in 2004 in Kempen, a small town in western Germany, and grew up as the only child of a single mother. My first school was the Regenbogen Grundschule, right across the street from our apartment, close enough that you could look from our living room straight into my classroom. After that, I moved on to the Städtisches Gymnasium Thomaeum, where I spent most of my teenage years. I have particularly fond memories of the computer science club and being involved in the school's musical productions.
In late 2022, I began studying Computer Science at ETH Zurich. It wasn't where I had originally planned to end up, as my first-choice schools were in the US.
2024 was the year everything opened up. I spent about four months in Helsinki, Finland, working as a systems engineering intern at NVIDIA. Outside of work, I fell in love with the Finnish landscape: the hiking trails, the long summer runs, and even indoor surfing. From there, I moved to Amsterdam for a couple of months to intern at Optiver, followed by about four months at Princeton, New Jersey. That chapter ended with a road trip from Denver to San Francisco, camping our way through the National Parks.
In 2025, I came back to Zurich to focus on my studies, but it didn't stay quiet for long. I took on a three-month internship at Palantir in London while carrying a 40 ECTS course load in parallel. After that, I joined McKinsey for another three months in Zurich, during which I also spent about a month working out of Dubai.
Now, in 2026, I'm finalizing my degree at ETH Zurich and doing research at UC Berkeley in security and AI red-teaming.