Aarav Shori

I’m the kind of person who takes the remote apart to see why it stopped working. Sometimes I even put it back together.

Born in Singapore and raised between Hong Kong and Dubai, I’ve been homeschooled since grade six. That mostly means my classroom moves around, my teachers are very patient, and my bedroom has slowly turned into a workshop. My parents have accepted this. Mostly.

Robots, Lego, code, drones, VR, Arduino boards: if it beeps, moves, lights up, or snaps together, I want to know how it works. I’ve built rovers that drove straight into walls and written code that worked on the fifth try. My chemistry experiments are designed not to set anything on fire, though I’m still working on that. My favourite moment is when something finally works and I have no idea which fix did it.

When I’m not building, I’m drawing maps of countries that don’t exist. What if one battle had gone the other way? What if a river had been somewhere else? I’ve even built entire continents in Minecraft, which I’m told counts as geography.

I speak English, Hindi and Spanish, which in theory lets me chat with roughly one in three people on the planet. In practice, it means I can order spaghetti on three continents. I love anything involving balance (horse riding, ice skating, skiing, skateboarding) and have fallen off, over or down in all four. I shoot hoops with mixed results, dive with sharks that hopefully aren’t hungry, and do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which I started after watching Enola Holmes take down people twice her size. Getting pinned to the mat is an excellent lesson in humility.

I’ll play any instrument I can get my hands on: drums (the loudest, so my favourite), keyboard, guitar, plus short, squeaky adventures with the cello and flute. Wherever I travel, I jam with local musicians who are far better than me and kind enough not to say so.

At home, I grow vegetables in our kitchen garden. Nothing beats a tomato you kept alive yourself, especially in a bowl of spaghetti, my all-time favourite food. My mom and I build furniture and make art for our home, and she’s hung my artwork in her office, where she shows it off to anyone who walks in. When she travels, I like to believe I’m the boss of the house, which mostly means bossing around my little brother. In fairness, I help with his homeschooling too, so he gets something out of the deal.

After finishing school at fifteen, I knew one thing: I wasn’t ready for college yet. So I applied to Baret Scholars on a whim and somehow got in as the youngest student, with a merit scholarship. Now I’m hopping across 15 countries with friends from over 25 of them. Late-night conversations with them have taught me more than any textbook, mostly that we’re far more alike than different. Along the way, I’ve packed meals in New York, helped with community work in Guatemala, and volunteered with the Red Cross in São Paulo.

I’m figuring out where all of this leads. So far, every road points back to building things, and to history and geography, my two oldest obsessions. This time I get to walk through them instead of reading about them.

Still curious. Still building. Still occasionally breaking things