Mina Kim

When Mina Kim first walked into a Youth in Tech workshop, she assumed she would build one robot and move on. Instead, the mentors kept inviting her back - first as a participant, then as a peer tutor, and eventually as a teaching assistant for the next cohort.

By her final year of high school, Mina was leading a team that built an assistive-navigation prototype for visually impaired students. The project won a regional science fair and, more importantly, convinced her that engineering could serve people directly.

Today, Mina is an AI Research Fellow studying reinforcement learning. She still returns to Youth in Tech twice a year to run the same workshop that changed her path - this time from the other side of the workbench.