Mihili’s story begins with engineering as something close enough to touch. Both her parents are engineers, and growing up around them made the field feel familiar long before it became her own. For a while, she moved between possible versions of that future. Then COVID arrived, and boredom became an opening. Mihili began learning to code.

She started where many self-taught programmers of that era started: Harvard’s CS50. Then came web development, small projects, algorithmic puzzles, and hours of trying to make code do what she imagined. What began as curiosity became discipline. What began as something to do became a language she wanted to keep speaking.

At Girls’ High School, Kandy, Mihili was never only a “STEM student.” She loved mathematics because a Grade 7 teacher had shown her its beauty. She enjoyed science, but also English literature and French. She joined the English Literary Association, helped host drama and speech competitions, captained the Scrabble team, joined robotics, and stayed involved in house activities even when many around her narrowed life down to A/Ls alone. Later, while applying to college, she realized that this mattered: she had not built a résumé. She had built a life.

Her computer science journey sharpened through the National Olympiad in Informatics. Largely self-taught, she reached the final round, placed highly, and was likely the first girl to reach that stage. Twice, she emerged as the best girl in the competition. Twice, she found herself nearly alone in a room that made visible what she already sensed: Sri Lanka had brilliant girls in computing, but not enough of them were being seen, trained, or surrounded.

TSN reached Mihili through the press; her mother had seen our first cohort’s results in The Sunday Times and recognized the possibility. At the time, studying in America still felt distant, almost statistical. TSN’s greatest support came through essay guidance. Her mentor helped her polish not only sentences, but also her self-presentation. Writing about herself felt strange at first: like marketing, like humble-bragging, like trying to prove worth without sounding desperate. But slowly, her essays became an artifact of who she was: Scrabble, robotics, Olympiad, school, code, community, ambition.

At Cornell, Mihili found what she had once lacked: a technical community dense with people building, asking, trying, and teaching. She joined project work, learned Android development, later helped teach Android herself, and began mentoring newer students. Her current interests stretch across public transportation, NLP, machine learning, data science, design, photography, and poetry—proof that the girl who once worried about being reduced to “girl in STEM” was always much more than that.

Mihili’s story proves that girls in STEM do not need to wait until they feel fearless. They can be intimidated and still continue. They can be self-taught and still be world-class. They can come from Kandy, write their way honestly into Cornell, and then turn around to make the room less lonely for the next girl entering it.

Thuwaragesh Jayachandran’s first language of possibility was mathematics.

In Grade 6, a zonal-level Olympiad problem taught him something he never forgot: the hardest questions did not always require knowledge he lacked. Sometimes they required him to stay with what he already knew for longer, turn it around, and notice the hidden route. Marks brought pressure, but problem-solving brought something deeper: the thrill of realizing that a simple idea could open a difficult world.

Thuwaragesh grew up in a family that understood education as survival, sacrifice, and hope. His parents had both spent years as migrant workers, carrying the familiar dream of giving their children the security they themselves had not been able to inherit. After his father suffered a heart attack in 2013, the family’s circumstances grew tighter. His parents moved houses so he could travel more easily to Hindu College. Teachers waived tuition fees. One retiring teacher, who had never taught him, supported him monthly because other teachers saw a student worth backing.

By A-Levels, the path seemed fixed: earn a high Z-score, enter Moratuwa Engineering, find a stable job, support his family. Even amidst his studies, he continued the extracurriculars he loved (math Olympiads, Scrabble, debating) not because he was building a foreign university application, but because they were genuinely enjoyable for him. When he placed island second in Physical Science, it looked as if the Sri Lankan path had worked.

Then came the gap after A-Levels: COVID delays, economic crisis, his mother’s illness, and the pressure to earn. Thuwaragesh began teaching tuition, though the industry sat uneasily with his values. He charged carefully, taught some students for free, and enjoyed the teaching more than the business.

He first heard about TSN through Ghaura Mahabaduge, a past Scholar and MIT graduate, but did not understand what it was. Only later, seeing the pilot cohort’s results online, did he realize this was a path he could try. For him, TSN’s most important gift was translation: need-based aid, the Common App, recommendation letters, transcripts, university lists, deadlines, and a one-to-one mentor who made him write something each week. From complete blankness, the process became navigable.

When his acceptance from Caltech came in, he was tutoring a student. He checked his phone, saw the decision, took a screenshot, and told only a few people. He waited for financial aid before telling his family. Even then, going was a trade-off: leaving home meant leaving responsibilities. But Caltech gave him something Moratuwa could not have given in the same way: permission to ask what he truly wanted to explore.

He arrived intending to study electrical engineering. But physics won. At Caltech, beautifully sequenced classes and funded research experiences pulled him toward quantum many-body physics, condensed matter, quantum computation, and systems too complex to solve directly.

Thuwaragesh’s story is not about hardship being redeemed by prestige. It is about a ationef student, held up by sacrifice and community, reaching a place where survival could make room for wonder.

Ranudi did not arrive at literature because it was the safest path. She came to it because it was the first place where thinking felt alive.

She once thought she might choose visual art. Then she discovered literature and realized studying could mean reading books she wanted to read anyway. Literature gave her something the Sri Lankan classroom rarely made room for: opinion. There was no single answer waiting at the back of the textbook. To write well, she had to decide what she thought, defend it, and live inside ambiguity.

Oscar Wilde became one early doorway. The Nightingale and the Rose led her to The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the soul becomes visible on a canvas. For Ranudi, writing became a way of seeing what was hidden. Her first poem came from heartbreak in a tuition class, in fact\!

Soon, poetry became private weather made legible.

That practice deepened through Girl Gone Wilde, the poetry account where she shared her work. Under the mentorship of poet samodH Porawagamage, Ranudi began to understand revision not as correction, but as care: the long-term tending of a draft before release.

Choosing the A/L Arts stream was not frictionless. Even obtaining the subject selection form became “a whole thing.” Ranudi chose English Literature, Mathematics, and Statistics. She knew she wanted a life that felt fulfilling, not one she would arrive at decades later only to realize had belonged to other people’s expectations.

Before TSN, studying abroad was not part of the plan. “All my eggs were in the public university basket,” she says. During the pandemic, an Instagram story led her to our first-ever webinar, where she heard something almost unreal: it was possible to receive financial aid and attend college abroad for free. She applied before sitting for her A-Levels.

As a member of our pilot cohort, Ranudi learned how to turn a life of reading and writing into an application that “made sense.” Her mentor helped her see that the essay, activities list, writing supplement, and financial aid documents all had to tell one story. The work was technical, but also intimate: learning what to reveal, how to be vulnerable, and how to own her agency.

At Williams, a full scholarship made everything possible. In small seminar rooms, Ranudi found people who arrived having read deeply and genuinely wanted to discuss. Essays were not about the “right” answer. They were about asking a question with stakes and following the thought honestly.

Distance changed her writing. After leaving Sri Lanka, her work became more grounded in home: trees, flowers, language, gender, class, and memory. That grounding now lives in Wombful of Weeds, her forthcoming poetry collection, shortlisted for the 32nd Gratiaen Prize in 2025\.

Ranudi’s story proves that the humanities are not a lesser dream. They are a way of thinking, remembering, questioning, teaching, and returning.