By Janet Li, a senior at MIT

David says he didn’t start programming until his senior year of high school. This is not taking into account the third grade, where he messed around with Logo, the turtle kids could program to move in certain directions and draw.

When David was the senior representative of his boarding school’s student government, he wanted to create a trip wiki where people could get permission to go on away trips and see what other trips were happening. He realized he needed to know programming to do this, so he sat down and learned PHP.

He knew he loved programming when he realized that he would lose track of time when he did it. “It’s just me and the computer,” he says. “Time doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”

Over time, David has gradually worked his way down the computer science stack, from the front-end to the back-end. His freshman year, he worked in the MIT Media Lab on a project called SixthSense, a wearable projector and camera system that allows the user to use the power of the Internet to interact with the things around them. Wearers can check their email, zoom in and out on a map, and get a book’s Amazon rating by physically placing it in front of them. Its innovation lies in, as David says, “bringing the internet into the real world as opposed to being this intangible thing that happens on a screen somewhere else.” He was able to publish his contributions to the project, which were also presented in a TED Talk viewed by millions.

David has also worked at VMware and Google, and dabbled in high frequency trading. At VMware, he helped write automated test scripts, and was able to save the company over $100,000 by automating network drivers.

He is currently doing research under Professor Charles Leiserson on hash functions and random number generators. Hash functions essentially take a large space of inputs and map them to a much smaller set of outputs, and so can make data much faster and easier to process. There are many applications, including storing files and creating file “fingerprints.”

What drew David to computer science was the ability for computers to carry out people’s grunt work. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to do the same thing more than five times over," he says. "If I have to do it that many times, it really should be automated.” His interest lies in maximizing efficiency in tedious tasks, and giving people more time to do the things they love.

David is also a Political Science minor and spent a semester in France studying at Sciences Po. He’s involved in the student government at MIT as Chief of Staff, and is responsible for the student representatives who interface with the faculty governance system. He is also a counselor for Camp Kesem, a summer camp for kids from families affected by cancer.

David enjoys figuring out how other websites are made and playing around with their source code. He once found a security bug in one of MIT’s public directories. Other of David’s everyday activities include keeping a monitor in his wardrobe to display his calendar and the weather and using his special Dropbox folder that automatically converts his files to PDFs.

While David recognizes the power of computers to complete repetitive tasks, there are times when he realizes efficiency is not the most important thing. He shoots darkroom photography, enjoys pen and paper, and eschews smartphones for their inability to replace human contact.

“I think it’s important to realize the difference between things that you have to do and things that you want to do,” he says. “My dream is to make it so that everyone is doing things that they love in terms of process and not having to worry about the things they have to do.”