So, how did you end up at edgi?
How a bored high schooler ended up joining an EdTech startup in New York.
School was online because of COVID, and I was bored in Zoom choir—yes, choir on Zoom, where no one was actually singing—when I spotted an email from Fiveable about a writing competition. Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and the challenge was to write a letter convincing Putin to end the war. I wrote and recorded my entry in class. A few weeks later, I’d won a cash prize and some “edgi coins.” I had no idea what to do with the coins, so I asked—and ended up with an invitation to edgi.
As a high school junior looking for more than another AP class, I found myself looking forward to edgi’s discussions and town halls with students around the world. When the idea of making our own educational videos came up, I volunteered to lead. A few of us each made a video and wrote a proposal within 48 hours, then voted on who would lead the project. I won and started leading edgi creators.
I made roughly one video a week and helped other students develop their ideas, scripts, and edits. By mid-summer, the team asked, “Do you want to get paid for making videos?” Since I was already making them, that was an easy yes. I became edgi’s first user-turned-intern, eventually taking on community management, social media, and design.
When edgi began experimenting with LLMs, the team was struggling to get GPT-3 to consistently generate multiple-choice questions. I started testing prompts in OpenAI Playground until I got it to work. That earned me the nickname “bot whisperer” and gradually led me into product design, where I went on to design many of our educational chatbots.
edgi showed me that even as a high schooler, I could do (really) big things. I found people who took my ideas seriously, trusted me to try things I hadn’t done before, and let me jump headfirst into startup life. One day, you’re bored in Zoom choir, looking for something to do; the next, you’re making pitch decks for investors. I hadn’t set out to join a startup—I didn’t even know that was an option. Not bad for a letter I wrote because I was bored in choir.