Beshr Islam Bouli

I grew up during the Syrian conflict with very limited computer science resources. Therefore, I used MIT OpenCourseWare and other MIT online resources to teach myself computer fundamentals, coding, and algorithm designing. These resources led me to win the Syrian Informatics Olympiad, participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics, and win a Bronze medal in the Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad. More importantly, during this journey, I always made sure to share this knowledge by teaching and mentoring hundreds of high school students and helping them start their CS journey. Fortunately, what started with watching MIT lectures from my little room in Aleppo ended up years later with an MIT acceptance and full scholarship. In the future, I will make sure to take advantage of MIT's various resources and work hard to make CS education more accessible to everyone around the world.