About

I was born in Bollnäs to immigrant parents. Shortly after I turned six, my mother moved me and my sister to Malmö, and that's where I spent the next ten years. The private school I ended up at treated curiosity as the whole point. Teachers pushed us to look past the easy answer.

In 2016, at sixteen, I came to New York on my own. The first months went into a shelter, a few foster homes, and the fight for Special Immigrant Juvenile status. I finished high school and enrolled at CUNY Queensborough, where I started out thinking I would study criminal justice. Most of what shaped me there happened outside the classroom. My first real job was at HeartShare, a nonprofit whose programs support foster youth, their families, and other communities. I worked out of their New York City headquarters, where frontline staff would come in for panel sessions, with three of us up front fielding questions on scenarios and best practices. Not long after, I was appointed to the ACS Workforce Development Advisory Council, advising the assistant commissioner on services for vulnerable youth and families across the city.

The NYC shutdown began in March 2020. I joined student government at QCC as a Senator at Large that spring, and in November I ran for President Pro Tempore. The room had largely lined up behind candidates they were friends with, but the speech landed and I won by one or two votes. I've kept it. Within weeks I was also elected Executive Vice President for the following term, and around the same time the University Student Senate, CUNY's system-wide student government, brought me on as an advisor. Most of my hours went into helping students stay steady. The role paid a salary and I donated every cent to the campus food pantry. The specifics of those roles live on the Experience page.

After much consideration I told the SGA and the faculty in April 2021 that I would be enlisting in the Marine Corps. It was a hard call. I valued the constituents and the work of helping them. But I'd come to believe time in the Corps would make me a stronger leader, the kind with more to offer the people I'd want to serve later on. I had been telling myself for years that I would enlist eventually, and if I kept waiting for graduation or for some better moment, eventually would turn into never. So I went.

I took my first trips to Korea and Japan during my Marine Corps years, and both of them stuck with me. Before long I moved back to Korea. My honorable discharge came through while I was there, and I chose to stay. All told, almost two years in Korea and close to a year in Japan. The cafés in Seoul are an art form of their own, the competition there is relentless in a way that reads as generous more than anxious, and people carry themselves with a confidence I kept studying.

Japan was the opposite lesson. I spent most of my year in Kyoto, walking to shrines and through parks almost every day. It's still the place where my head is quietest.

I also founded Outure, a consulting firm across Sweden and the United States, to put professional tools within reach of people starting out without institutional backing. The next version is still taking shape.

I chose NYU because a college degree is something I've wanted to finish for a long time, and because a university is one of the few places where sitting next to people whose lives look nothing like yours is the point rather than a side effect.