In his senior year of high school, Michael was told about a hackathon at a nearby school, HackNA. Having piqued his interests, Michael decided to see what a hackathon was like. While his team of four did not end up winning with their Flappy Bird clone, Michael knew that he had found something special. 

When Michael started school at Penn State University, he sought out HackPSU. At his first HackPSU, he won a sponsor prize. He later joined the organizing team. Ever since, he has been an active and passionate hacker in the community. He has attended hackathons around the country like Bitcamp, PennApps as well as helped to run his own school’s HackPSU. 

Before hackathons, Michael felt a lack of motivation to code since the only extracurricular programming experience he had was programming and designing robot control systems. Engaging with the hacking community helped Michael see there were many different ways to utilize hardware and software to impact the world. 

Since joining the hacker community, his experience as an event organizer helped him in his role as Co-Executive Director of HAX, a nonprofit aiming to help underrepresented minorities receive programming and computer science education.

His favorite project he’s made is Image2Haiku. Based on the idea that an image is worth a thousand words, they came up with the concept of a website where an uploaded image is converted into a haiku. Utilizing Google, AccuWeather, Clarifai, and other APIs, he and his team scraped location, weather, and mood data from the uploaded image and fed that data into a word engine to generate the His team won the AccuWeather sponsor prize and demoed the project on the AccuWeather podcast.