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hi, i'm fxhw

my god, I just remembered that we die.

I'm a student doing undergrad CS, really interested in complexity theory, machine learning, and math in general. Prior to choosing to major in CS, I was almost certain I would pursue a career in mathematics, but participating in a few university courses hooked me on CS.

Welcome to my website.


I build things out of thoughts that won’t leave me alone. I write and collect the fragments that feel important. I’m also documenting my journey— what I’m learning, what I’m building, and the questions I haven’t answered yet.

This blog is where I keep the thoughts that linger.

And here, the shelf of books that inspired those thoughts.

chronologia
2020
2020

Quarantine eureka

Isolated with way too much free time, I joined a Discord community called Homework Help, home to over 150,000 members.
There, I discovered a passion for teaching mathematics, spending countless hours educating thousands of people. My contributions earned me recognition as a Valued Contributor by the server owners.
Over time, I learned calculus and LaTeX, creating helpful resources for the server.

I resigned in 2022 to pursue other endeavors.
2022
2022

Yearning for more math & teaching

After resigning, I realized I had created a huge void in my life. Seeking inspiration, I attended the University Expo in Qatar, where I met representatives from MIE University. Impressed by my notes on Euler's Identity, they invited me to deliver a talk at their university.

I learned Beamer, prepared a presentation alongside my notes, and presented to undergraduate CS students.
2023
2023

Research galore

A peer introduced me to Weill Cornell’s Doctors of the Future Research competition and suggested we compete together. Leading the team, I helped analyze desalination models and their feasibility in Qatar to address national water scarcity.

We made it to the finals.
2024.1
2024.1

Disaster @ CMUQ

The summer before my senior year of high school, I attended Carnegie Mellon University’s Summer College Preview Program—a three-week course designed to give high school students a taste of the CMU experience.
Naively, I chose CS as my major, assuming it would be the closest to mathematics.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. My time at CMU was so transformative that it made me question my plans for the future. Seeing my programming skills, CMU lecturers and students encouraged me to consider studying CS.

For my final project, I programmed a robot to find the area of any continuous, closed shape using Riemann sums with custom input widths—one last tribute to my love for mathematics.
2024.2
2024.2

Writing college essays pays off!

In December, I represented my school in the 9th Annual Inter-School Literary Competition in Qatar, competing in essay writing. Ironically, this came after months of writing endless college admission essays.
I placed second for my essay on climate-sustainable technology.

2025
2025

Marhaba Tartan (& Stanford)!

I applied and was accepted as a Section Leader at Stanford University's Code In Place program, teaching and preparing python lessons for 15 students over the course of 6 weeks based on Stanford's introductory programming class.

Within the same week, I officially became a Tartan!
2026.1
2026.1

Proofs & prose

My first full year of undergrad looked like arriving on campus at 8 AM and leaving around 8 PM, most days.
I somehow took way too many proof classes. Sitting through GTI was horrifying most of the time, but the exciting type of horrifying.

In the same semester, a Professor dear to me invited me to assist in an introductory English course— so my weeks alternated between writing proofs and reading essays.
2026.2
2026.2

Noise in, structure out

Two projects, one shape.
I contributed to Eclipse Adoptium alongside industry mentors, building the (back-)back-end of an AI-powered log analysis tool that traces root causes and proposes fixes. My part was Drain3 and a great deal of regex, turning an unreadable log file into a clean array of data structures.

Then the aforementioned Professor brought me on as an assistant to the Arts & Sciences department @ CMUQ, where I wrote Pandoc pipelines to standardize a mess of .docx into .tex, and experimented with OCR and vector embeddings to compare what a research poster says against what its presenter actually said.

It turns out a lot of CS is just really taking something noisy, messy and making it hold still. (oh, and communicating it effectively)
2026.3
2026.3

Full circle @ CMUQ

Two years after the Summer College Preview Program talked me out of a career in mathematics, I was selected to return to it as a Peer Tutor Counselor.

Same three weeks, same building, opposite side of the room (at the back, lol). Now I'm the one telling an overzealous high-schooler that their plan for the future might not survive the month.
2026.4
2026.4

Five months for Mitski

Sometime back in February, I booked Mitski in Istanbul for May. External conflicts decided to uproot my plans. Gutted, gutted, gutted, gutted.
But stubborn more than gutted, I booked her again for July.

Five months late, in Bangkok, I finally saw my favorite artist in the flesh.
And got open water certified while at it!
Mitski onstage in Bangkok
BKK, July 16 2026. Five months late.
2026.5
2026.5

Above. Tawafq

I was selected for the Qatar Foundation TAFAWQ scholarship, awarded on a 4.0 GPA— a full ride covering tuition, academic materials, and housing, plus a monthly stipend through the academic year.

It arrived at a moment when I was no longer certain the path through higher education was as clear as it once was. Having someone decide to back it anyway is not a small thing. Eternally grateful.