I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I graduated from Carnegie Vanguard High School (a top-ranking public high school in Houston) in June 2019 at 16-years-old as the student with the second highest GPA in my Class. I now call Durham, North Carolina my new home, since I am a proud Blue Devil of Duke University's Class of 2024. Although I was originally accepted to Duke as a member of the Class of 2023, I deferred my admission and took a Gap Year as part of the Duke Gap Year Program before starting my freshman year at Duke in August 2020.

My Gap Year wasn't my first time volunteering in Latin America. In the summer of 2017, I spent four weeks living and working in San Rafael, Costa Rica. I also spent six weeks in El Calabacito, Panama during the summer of 2018. During both of those experiences, I was really pushed out of my comfort zone in that I lived out of a backpack, slept on a cot, solely commuted by foot, took ice-cold showers, didn't have any AC, and battled relentless mosquitoes. Despite these conditions, I am grateful to have had the wonderful opportunity to befriend and do collaborative community projects with people from various walks of life. This appreciation of diversity profoundly translates over to my work with MSP.

After having to dig myself out of that abyss in pre-AP biology, it was important to me that I give incoming freshmen after me the recipe for the "secret sauce" to success in school. That way, they could hit the ground running their first year of high school instead of undergoing the grueling transition process that I endured. This incentivized me to spend the summer before my 10-grade year creating an unprecedented academic achievement club called Swimming Downstream (SDS) in order to unveil to ninth-graders the tips, tactics, and skills needed to excel at a rigorous high school (click here to visit the SDS website). For three years, I met with the club members of SDS every other week during lunch time to present on what it takes to make straight As at our high school. Under my leadership, SDS grew from four students its first year to 37 students its second year to over 100 students its third year. To this day, SDS is still alive and in operation thanks to the hard work of my successors!

My involvement with SDS intensified my love for being a mentor and coach to others. For me, there's nothing more fulfilling than sharing my knowledge, expertise, and experiences to help someone else navigate a path that I've already traveled. However, the reality of SDS was that I was working with students who had already begun life with a head start—who had already been somewhat exposed to a roadmap for academic success—given that many of them came from higher-income backgrounds with college-educated parents who were deeply committed to school. 

This situation with SDS catalyzed my eventual recognition of the "flip side of the coin": There are students in this world who have been involuntarily born into unfortunate circumstances that present barriers to them accessing the resources necessary for their success in the classroom. For this reason, I founded Mack's School Prep; it's through MSP that I serve as a role model who empowers and equips socioeconomically disadvantaged high schoolers to thrive, and not just survive, in school. That way, those students can unlock and maximize their true potential, as well as feel motivated and prepared to pursue a higher education after high school. In other words, by leveraging my YouTube videos and other forms of social media to provide under-resourced students a step-by-step academic blueprint for how to take advantage of their education, my priority is to set these same students up to better conquer the generational status quo that currently isn’t positioning them to apply to universities, earn a college degree, and open the door to fulfilling job prospects. All in all, through creating and disseminating my educational resources, I want to mentor and support high schoolers who are caught in a self-defeating struggle to get ahead of the curve, so that I can ultimately be a beacon of encouragement who helps them believe in themselves and realize that they—and only they—possess the power to better their futures.