1. Why did you join this Impact Fellowship program (motivation, prior interests)?

I used to think it was essential to spread out. I had (and still have) multiple intellectual interests and was involved in my quest for meaning, but along the way, I realized that you don’t need 10 keys to open a door. You just need the right key. Yet, the key holder still has multiple keys except that to each door, a key is given.

I joined the Silicon Valley Social Impact Fellowship because I wanted to hone my focus on social impact, double down on people, as well as set the foundation for, if not build, innovative and student-led social impact ventures.

• I’m excited to make new connections with highly talented and motivated individuals
• Through the Impact Fellowship, I want to broaden my scope on fundamental problems as well as simple solutions to these complex problems
• Through the fieldwork, I believe I’ll have a chance to connect directly with the community, build bonds, as well as listen before jumping to conclusions.
• I’m also curious to experience the Bay Area and how the people come together every day to make “Silicon Valley” deliver ripple effects across the globe.

2. How do you envision this course making you a better () student?

Over the past couple of months, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of communities. Everything I’ve come to learn has been against the backdrop of student communities. 

Over the next couple of weeks, my team and I will make incredible progress going from nothing to zero. But in order for us to go from zero to one, we need to be surrounded by a community of highly talented founders, industry-agnostic mentors, and a network of professional coaching specially designed to meet our needs. This is what I believe would take to not only go through our next milestone successfully but also set the foundation for subsequent milestones. 

As a Silicon Valley Social Impact Fellow, I want to tap into the Silicon Valley ecosystem to continue to learn, unlearn and even relearn the foundations of building a product users need enough to pay for it and also love enough to tell others about it and I want to do it together with my amazing team!

• Project Management: By working with my team on several aspects of our project, I believe I’ll further hone my project management skills, become familiar with different methodologies as well understand how to take a project from zero to one.
• Community Building: As an advocate of community building, I’m excited to see our project integrated into multiple SF communities as this will allow me to continue to learn and unlearn the basics of community building.

3. The World Health Organization estimates that over one billion people who need eyeglasses do not have access to them. The vast majority of these people live in developing countries where there is barely one optometrist for every one million people. Given the high poverty levels, access to eyeglasses is almost non-existent. Lack of proper eyeglasses severely impacts people and their livelihoods by decreasing their productivity at work, limiting or eliminating new opportunities, affecting their quality of life, deteriorating their general health, and possibly leading to (preventable) blindness. What solution do you propose to address this problem?

• Introducing telemedicine by leveraging technology to reach several patients for diagnosis
• Prototype reusable eye-glasses as in a sharing economy, one that is built on access over ownership. Allow individuals to access eye glasses without owning them. That way, we can produce few eyeglasses for many.