Growing up in a rural Illinois town of 1,500, I attended a Title I school through 8th grade. A last-minute application to a lab school founded at SpaceX opened a door I didn't know existed. The school was electric, and it changed how I think about education: if access to transformative opportunity is this arbitrary, something is systemically broken. I focus my work on understanding why public education is resistant to systemic reform and how political and design choices can drive better educational outcomes.