Why I Do This

Greenfield

If you asked where this started, I would take you to the downtown Indianapolis library. My mom drove me there from Greenfield before school. She worked hard for those mornings. I remember walking in and falling in love with the quiet: rows of books, the sense that anything I wanted to know was already on a shelf. I worked there later, not only as a kid who loved the shelves but as someone whose job was to show up for that room.

Every day before work she made me two hard-boiled eggs. I hated them ... the smell, the aftertaste, the way they sat in my stomach. It was not until I was older that I understood what she was doing. She believed those eggs would help me grow and think sharper. It was never about the eggs. It was one unglamorous breakfast at a time, the same instinct that later showed up as budgeting lessons, negotiation, and learning to advocate for myself instead of waiting for someone else to speak.

I also lived in China for a period. English came second. Nobody handed me a blueprint for any of this. Waiting for one was never an option.

The drive into Indianapolis

From sixth grade through high school my mom drove me from Greenfield into Indianapolis every school day. First to SRES (St. Richard’s Episcopal School), class of 2019. Then to Cathedral High School, class of 2023. That is not a short commute twice a day for years. I did not understand the size of that sacrifice until I was old enough to drive myself and realised how much of my life had arrived through her front seat.

In middle school I joined my school’s robotics team. Engineering stopped being a textbook and became wiring, debugging, and staying late with a machine that only worked if you kept showing up. Summers I chased the same feeling at STEM camps at Cathedral and Park Tudor. Somewhere in the middle it clicked: this was not a club for a certain kind of person. It was for a Chinese American kid from Greenfield who grew up on library trips and eggs she gagged on. Films like Hidden Figures, October Sky, and Contact made that feel even more real ... people written out of the story were often the reason the story worked.

Cathedral

At Cathedral I took AP Computer Science Principles as a freshman and AP Computer Science A in Java after that. I am still glad my Asian American CS teacher believed in me. I followed that with honours classes and robotics honours. I was in iSquad all four years ... the student-led tech support team for teachers and students in Cathedral’s iPad 1:1 programme.

The COVID-19 years were not only a closed restaurant. I stayed on the robotics team (design, build, test, and judging slides). I produced graphics, video, and posts for CHS Live, and I did school marketing and photography when the usual in-person calendar had holes. I sat on Student Council. I was a Freshman Experience Leader for incoming students trying to land in a disrupted school. I coached Girls JV tennis and counselled a summer tennis camp. I organised Stop Asian Hate workshops and school-wide awareness drives, and logged more than 200 hours of community service. I also ran shifts as a lead at a local Indianapolis coffee shop. I have not locked exact months here ... they belong to that stretch of high school, not to a LinkedIn cause dropdown.

I was also a yearbook photographer: on the sideline with a camera, waiting for the moment that would still feel true when the book went to print. That habit ... noticing from the edge ... shows up in how I write about systems now.

Fourteen, fifteen, and a closed restaurant

I was fourteen or fifteen when COVID-19 hit. I was in high school at Cathedral, not at university. IU came later: Direct Admit, Fall 2023, class of 2027.

My parents ran a restaurant. When the pandemic arrived they had to close and let staff go. I watched something they had built with their hands stop almost overnight. I stepped in, still in high school, without a plan. I taught myself how to put the restaurant online, how to reach people on YouTube, how point-of-sale systems worked. I was not doing it to look impressive. I was doing it because it was the only thing I could control, and because I had already been taught that when something breaks, you build the fix yourself.

That rebuild is a high-school fact. It is not where my IU story starts.

Bloomington

When it came time to choose a college, IU felt mutual. I am reading for a B.S. in Informatics (Business and Society) at the Luddy School as a Luddy HIEP Scholar and Hudson and Holland Platinum Scholar. At Serve IT (Laurie McRobbie Serve IT Nonprofit Clinic), Luddy’s university-run technology clinic, I lead web development so local nonprofits can carry out their missions on systems that remain workable after delivery ... reliable handoffs for partners without in-house engineering support. I also coordinate the Mentor Apprenticeship Programme (MAP) within Faculty and Staff for Student Excellence (FASE), the two-semester training track that prepares peer mentors to support first-year students. Through Luddy LINK, Luddy’s applied-project programme, I lead the Digital Humans project (February 2025 to present), researching digital humans (AI-driven virtual personas) for business use cases. From August 2026 I also support Hudson & Holland Scholars Programme (HHSP) programming as a Programme Assistant in Undergraduate Education. Campus has handed me more rooms than I expected ... Student Life, the former Office of DEI before it was dissolved, Handshake content that reached 150K+ students, the IU Leadership Conference, and networking that was sometimes kind and sometimes plainly cruel.

Mimi Attenoukon mattered in that stretch. The fuller thank-you lives on jadexzhao. I did not get into a sorority during recruitment, and it stung. I already knew belonging was often something you build, not something you are handed. I just needed the reminder.

Yuri ... we got you in Bloomington. Thank you for the walks that led to campus, and for being there when words were not enough.

Screens that hurt, then screens I could build

I was cyberbullied when the internet still felt like something adults had not figured out. The same screens that hurt me were also where I learned I could build something back ... that a page or a script does not care where you are from if you can make it work. That is part of why I call myself a reformed iPad kid in my bio, and why I care about accessibility and maintainable systems now. The longer version of that thread is in 小猫钓鱼.

Nobody sat me down and explained what to do when the internet turns on you. I figured that out the same way I figured out most of this list.

What I build toward

Documenting systems friction in Madrid, handing off accessible builds at ServeIT and ServeAI, and staying in public-interest work taught me that engineering is not really about the technology. It is about who gets seen by it and who does not. Every form, every handoff, every interface has someone standing behind it who is either being served or being ignored. Growing up in a family restaurant shaped that standard: a system has to hold under real use, not only under demonstration. I decided early which side of that line I wanted to build on.

After graduation I am looking toward a software engineering role, with particular interest in database management, internal information systems, IT teams, and extract, transform, load (ETL) pipelines.

When AI stopped being abstract for me, the feeling was recognition, not fear. It felt like the automation I learned in middle-school robotics, grown up and wearing a new name. I want to be plainspoken when people talk about it like magic or like a threat only experts get to name. I do not want my voice overwritten in that conversation.

I still put myself on the map because I want a younger Jade somewhere to look up and see someone who looks like her already standing there ... not for credit, but so she knows she does not have to wait for permission. I loved wiring robots in an empty classroom before anyone called it a career path.

Rooms that did not make space

It has not always felt that way. I have worked in places where good work did not seem to matter in the room. I have sat in mostly white environments where I was proving I belonged before I opened my laptop. Consulting made me cry some nights. Founding Jade🌱 was not a triumph the whole way through. Burnout does not announce itself. It takes things slowly until you notice they are gone.

People pushed me toward graduate school as if credentials would fix what the workplace had withheld. As a first-generation student, more loans for another degree was not a small thought. I kept coming back to the same answer: if the room would not make space, I would build my own way in. That is also why I work solo as often as I do ... not because help is weakness, but because waiting for someone else to open the door has never been how I got anywhere that mattered.

Greenfield still shows up in me: the coffee shop where I studied, the Chinese buffet on nights nobody wanted to cook, ordinary corners that never land on a CV but shaped how I see community. If a bagel can have everything on it, I am allowed to be made of all of it too.

The thread

None of this is comfortable and almost none of it is quiet. The throughline is simpler than the list makes it sound: curiosity from a library, sacrifice from a mom who drove and fed and taught, hands-on engineering from robotics and iSquad, a high-school pandemic that forced me to prove I could fix what broke, screens that hurt and then became tools, and the slow work of learning that rest is not falling behind.

I build because I have watched what happens when people you love are counting on you to figure it out, and because somewhere a younger version of me is still watching to see if it is possible.