I Built a Battery Management System and Won a $100,000 Scholarship

University of Toronto, computer science
Schulich Leaders Scholarship
$100,000

I’ve been building and tinkering with computers since I was about nine years old. One day I looked at my laptop and I thought, This thing is dying too quickly. I went to my basement, grabbed a screwdriver and tried to figure out how the battery was being managed within the system. I figured there had to be an optimal method of charging it, and managing the power, using artificial intelligence. I knew how to code, but I wanted to figure out how to make a computer think. I did a bunch of research and discovered that AI was just math, which I was good at. I started developing algorithms that could manage battery use. It took a few years, and some guidance from engineers, but by Grade 11, I created a battery management system that factors in people’s daily computer usage to prolong battery life. 

I spent a lot of time in my guidance counselor’s office in high school because I wanted to graduate a year early. I saw a poster on his wall for the $100,000 Schulich Leader Scholarship. I became really interested when I learned it offered more than money—recipients would be involved in networking opportunities and conferences. Each high school can nominate one student, and I was nominated in January of my graduating year. I got an email from the Schulich scholarship website with a link to the application portal, where I had to answer questions about my achievements. While brainstorming, I pretended I was talking to another person, which helped me summarize my passion. I wrote about my battery management system as well as some other AI projects, like an app I worked on with my brother, who is in biomedical engineering. It analyzes heart attack risk and educates users on how they can minimize their risks. We haven’t deployed it, but it was a fun project to work on. 

In May, I found out I had received the Schulich scholarship to attend the University of Toronto. My family was on vacation in Thailand and I got the email at midnight, which is the middle of the day in Canada. I woke my parents up to tell them. We were so excited that we couldn’t sleep that night. 

A lot of foundational AI research has come out of U of T, and it’s inspiring to be a student where it all happened. I’m especially interested in spatial intelligence and applied AI, and in how computers can interact with and understand the world. I’ve applied for a provisional patent on my battery management system and hope to eventually sell it. 

This story appears in the 2026 edition of the Ultimate Guide to Canadian Universities. You can buy the issue for $19.99 here or on newsstands.