was there a kind of a pivotal point where it started to feel like work or maybe there's a little bit of overwhelm in there?

- I think the more and more I got closer to graduating high school, it started to feel less like a passion project where I was just going to pitch competitions every weekend and spending my free time building this idea to what do I actually want to do with the rest of my life and is this that thing?

So I always explored a lot of career paths.

Like I said, I was involved in everything and I always wanted to try everything.

So I tried engineering and law and medicine and all of those things fascinated me so much and it was so hard to choose that I think I almost forgot this entrepreneurship thing that I was working on the side could be an option.

So at the end of my junior year of high school, I was like, "Okay, it's time that I almost start applying to colleges and actually start thinking about what I want to do."

But I don't think I understood what the 95% of entrepreneurship looks like.

I'd just seen that like 5% TV shows and magazine articles and going to pitch contests and winning money, which is all really great.

But I think the 95% that people kept talking about was like, I just don't know what that means.

And I was scared that I'd find out way after I was, like, many years deep into it.

So I decided at the end of my junior year that I was just going to graduate a year early and spend the time in place of my senior year as a full-time entrepreneur.

And during that time, I joined the gBETA program here in Peoria, just really working out of different workspaces, cafes, trying to experience what it was like to be a professional at now 17 years old.

And I think that was a very scary year to start off with because there was so much ahead of me and there was really no direction.

I was doing something that most students weren't doing at that time.

But I think also going through that year and just continuing to build that network and going through the trenches of that 95% and finding the things that I like about that made the year very beneficial to my journey and I came out of that year feeling a lot stronger.

- Was there a gap between you're working hard on this for a year to then now I'm focused on school, let's just put that startup on the back burner?

- For me, the biggest thing was I didn't want to lose the momentum that I had built up during that gap year/senior year time that I had.

I feel like I'd done so much and so many people were expecting so many different things out of me and the product and the company as a whole that I felt like I just had to keep going.

So the decision of which college I went to was super important to me.

The decision of what I studied was very important to me.

And, ultimately, I was able to find a program where I've been able to study abroad in London, now be in Boston, meet other like-minded student founders, study that intersection of tech/entrepreneurship, and be in a program where I've had semesters at a time to just work on my startup full-time as well.

So I think that the experience that I might have had as a college student is probably different than some of my peers, but I think the program that I chose for myself ultimately allowed me to kind of have that happy medium that I was looking for.