Hi, I’m Morgan! I’m currently an 11th-grade member of the Inquiry & Innovation Program at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory. First off, I’ll tell you a little about myself. I love exploring the world around me, enjoying the serenity of nature over the busy streets of downtown San Francisco. In my free time, I play piano (which I’ve been doing for over 10 years), tinker around with Lego bricks, and read comic books. Over the summer, I’m a camp counselor at Japanese Community Youth Council’s (JCYC) Tomodachi Summer Program, inspiring youth through leadership activities. I have two amazing parents who have helped me become the best I could be. They have worked hard to provide for my sister and I, to give us this wonderful opportunity to attend SHC. My sister is currently a senior at SHC, in the i2 class of 2025. A few years ago, she was accepted into the i2 program, which was what inspired me to express such interest to join my freshman year.  

     The past few years in the i2 Class of 2026 has been a blast, filled with challenges and achievements along the way, instilling the lesson of never giving up. As an ambitious student, I try hard to strive for excellence, especially in my annual i2 Project, a personal strength and weakness of mine. Despite the determination that comes along with such ambition, sometimes it gets the better of me, as I struggle to find balance between work and rest at times. I was able to use such determination to find balance in my newest project, Crystal Clear OPS, an upgraded prototype of speech to text transcription technology embedded within a pair of glasses. Beginning a journey of working with Python and a Raspberry Pi for the first time, I stressed through the arduous process of learning the inner workings of both its hardware and software in the span of 3 months. Throughout the process, I recognized the value of such balance, as I realized…the human body functions optimally, only with breaks. My stress factor lowered significantly, and by the end of it, I finally enjoyed the satisfaction of such an accomplishment, knowing I developed many new skills myself and achieved my overall goal of serving others. 

     The i2 Program has offered me the opportunity to succeed within the confines of my own personal projects, but also introduced the internship program Inspirit AI to SHC in the summer of 2024. I instantly jumped at the chance to learn about the importance of artificial intelligence and its impactful role in our advancing society, instructed by Stanford and MIT alumni. Exercising cooperation with SHC students of different backgrounds and coding experience, we created a project using existing NASA data to search for exoplanets in the observable universe, implementing the idea of AI. Our group trained our model on this graphical data, interpreting the graphs both manually and with the aid of AI, while learning about the important idea of transit photometry, the main factor contributing to the creation of each graph, based on the consistency of the measurement of light from a distant star. 

     Finally, one of the most memorable accomplishments I’ve made throughout my time at SHC is my assistant directing career. In my freshman year, I stage managed (in training) for a year, for SHC’s 2022 fall production, The Play That Goes Wrong. Last year, I received the position of assistant director for the fall play, Frankenstein. In this wonderful opportunity, I’ve made so many friends, expanded much of my knowledge in the theater world, and learned the importance of cooperation, through the process of putting a play together. In past experiences of going outside my comfort zone, I’ve never felt such a welcoming community quite like this. Everyone was kind and encouraging, even if I made a mistake. This kind of attitude towards learning and change was shown by many other SHC students and faculty, outside the theater, and I hope to reflect it now and in the years to come.

MY BLOGS

From MAX to OPS: Running Transcription Headless and On Startup (P4)

…a vital step, because no user wants to run around with high-tech glasses connected to a giant monitor, keyboard, and mouse, completely contradicting the “portable” feature of the project. First off, what does “headless” and “on startup” even mean? Are they even the same thing? These were both questions I typed explicitly into my search […] Read more

From MAX to OPS: Transcription Software Testing (P3)

Approaching the end of May, (after studying for finals and AP Exams,) I began research on various speech recognition softwares that met my standards, having completed the first step of coding the OLED display. For the transcription portion of the project, I created a list of requirements and potential add-ons- first off, the software needed […] Read more

From MAX to OPS: Initial Installations and Planning Overview (P2)

Coding the Raspberry Pi 3B+ model began with a rocky start. I realized the steepest portion of the mountain arrived, just as AP Exams were around the corner, creating one of the most stressful weeks of my academic career. Knowing that ChatGPT-provided code did not perform sufficiently through various tests and presentations at the Showcase, […] Read more

From MAX to OPS: Research and Hardware (P1)

The end of the i2 Showcase marked the beginning of a long haul. Future steps from the speech-to-text transcribing flat-screen model presented at the 2024 i2 Showcase included an arduous, time-consuming upgrade into the glasses model, which we recognized early on to become “Crystal Clear MAX.” However, for someone as new to coding as I […] Read more

A Blog from the A.D. of Frankenstein

As a member of the i2 program, much of my academic career has mainly focused on various aspects of academia. However, throughout the course of my freshman year, I realized I needed somewhat of a break from it all, or at least a side hobby. And that “side hobby” developed into a full-scale immersion into […] Read more

Launching the '23-'24 i2 Project

For my 23-24 i2 project, I have decided to work with a fellow i2 9th grade student, and one of my close family-friends, Ashley Wang. Over the summer, we collaborated in deciding the topic of our project, which developed into focusing on helping a significant target community, encompassing approximately 15% of the world population- the […] Read more

Artificial Imagination

To begin tracing AI’s development within the field of mathematical education ten years in the future, I asked Poe.com’s Claude-Instant AI their opinion on the matter. Claude-Instant AI’s development company, Anthropic, aimed to create a safe and accurate artificial intelligence with a basic human level of common sense, unlike other AI’s, one being OpenAI’s ChatGPT. […] Read more

Phase 3 and 4: Results and Permanence (February 18 - March 28, the Week of the Showcase)

Our project has made some major progress over the past few months in communication, location, and comfortability. We recently met with Mr. Sazo to discuss the final steps of this project- making nap zones permanent around the school campus. He directed us to Dr. Skrade, the President of Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory, and we are […] Read more

Phase 2: Items and Testing (January 20- February 18)

Once all of our items arrived, we continued our testing phase with all of our items. Initially, my sister did not set time limits or rules for the team; we realized this would eventually become a maintenance issue, as water and food could be spilled on the beanbags, making it difficult to clean. Besides that, […] Read more

Phase 1.5: February 8, 2023

A day after implementing our bean bags in the DePaul location, we realized that a nap zone in DePaul would be inefficient, and we were almost ready to give up on the location. Since students could relax on the comfortable couches in the DePaul lobby, they would have no use for our nap zones. (However, […] Read more

Phase 1: Location and Pre-Testing (January 11-26)

After the shark tank, we met with Mr. Standley to talk with him about our potential ideas for nap zone spaces. With his advice, we reached out to Mr. Sazo, one of the deans, to talk with him about our ideas for our i2 project. Early January, he gave us permission to use the upper […] Read more

Phase 0: Shark Tank Reflections November 29, 2022

This was the first year Mr. Standley wanted to do a shark tank to make sure students had their i2 projects all thought out by the end of November. A few days before we were set to present to our sharks, Madi and I polished off the rest of our presentation slides. We had our […] Read more

The i2 Journey Begins...

Before my older sister started her application process, I never knew i2, let alone the enhancement it would bring to my high school experience at Sacred Heart Cathedral… In the fall, the entire nation was coming out of lockdown, as I began my high school application process. Filling out applications was the least stressful part […] Read more

Crystal Clear OPS

What comes to mind when you hear the word, or acronym, ‘OPS’? Operations? Optics? This project includes both ideas, being an operational prototype implementing research, coding, and design elements from the prior project (which concluded in the spring of 2024), Crystal Clear. The upgraded version of this project, Crystal Clear OPS, stems from the inspiration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s E.D.I.T.H. “smart glasses,” a piece of Stark Industries technology given to Spiderman...

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Inspirit AI: Planet Hunters

As the universe continues to expand this very moment, it becomes statistically impossible for us humans to be the only living species out here- and for Earth to be the only habitable planet for humans within the universe. Humans first discovered exoplanets in 1992. With the process of transit photometry, corporations focused on the field of astronomy (like NASA) study these fluctuations of light from various distant stars to determine whether exoplanets revolve around such stars...

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Crystal Clear

Ever wished your life was a movie? That’s the question that sparked the inspiration of Crystal Clear, a transparent monitor screen using LCD technology to convert audio to onscreen text, similar to how subtitles appear on a TV screen. Aiming to provide an additional alternative to tools such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and ASL, for those with audio-impairing conditions, Crystal Clear gives an opportunity for a whopping 20% of the world population to communicate more clearly...

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Space-Z

In a perfect world, all teenagers would navigate through life, and around obstacles like homework, extra-curricular activities, and jobs to create a good sleep schedule. Unfortunately, most SHC students don’t have the time to get enough sleep. Results from a survey showed that our classmates’ average bedtime is midnight, and some even past that. On school days, they wake up at 6 am to get to school for block 7 or 8’s. That’s only 6 hours of sleep! When you don’t get enough sleep…

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