I’m a high school senior from rural Illinois. Growing up in a town of 1,500 and attending a Title I school through eighth grade, my path changed when a last-minute application opened the doors to Astra Nova, a lab school founded at SpaceX. The electric environment showed me what education could be—but it also left me with a realization: if access to such transformative opportunity is this arbitrary, the system itself is broken. I focus my work on understanding why public education is resistant to reform, and what politics and design can do about it.