Full-scholarship student
Alpha is a private school in Austin where AI tutors cover academics in the mornings and students spend the afternoons building.
After a classmate threatened to shoot me, I found it myself, called admissions and applied that week.
I became the first student in its history on a full scholarship, and most of this map started there.
In ninth grade I was at Crockett High School, a public school in South Austin where fights broke out most days. One day a classmate threatened to shoot me and showed me photos of himself and his friends with guns. I didn't think he would actually pull the trigger, but I was sure I'd get jumped. My mom started asking the district for a transfer and asked me to look up schools nearby. I expected to land at another public school down the road.
I ran the search she asked for. Then, mostly for fun, I tried a different one: any school I could want. One result stopped me. Alpha High School was a new private high school in downtown Austin built around AI tutoring. Students finished their academics in a few hours each morning and spent the afternoons on real projects: companies, pitches, research.
Oh my gosh, this is my dream.
I picked up the phone and called Alpha's admissions team. The first thing I asked was whether they offered scholarships. They did, and that mattered: Alpha costs about $40,000 a year, and my family was going into debt. A full scholarship was the only way I could go.
That same week I wrote the essays, sent my transcripts, recorded a YouTube video about the business I wanted to build there, and spent a day shadowing at the school.
Alpha said yes. Joe Liemandt, the software entrepreneur who funds the school, personally funded my full scholarship, the first full ride in Alpha's history. On March 25, 2024, the Monday after spring break and about two weeks after the threat, I walked into Alpha High with a few months of freshman year left.
Alpha runs on two to three hours of AI-tutored academics each morning. The afternoons belong to AlphaX, the school's entrepreneurship program, where I took the advanced entrepreneurship and distribution courses and worked on my own ventures.
The model only works if you own your results. Every Friday for about a year and a half, I presented a self-review to the head of school covering my academics, my ventures and my personal goals. My grades held up while I built: I've scored only 4s and 5s on every AP exam I've taken.
Alpha put me in rooms I couldn't have reached on my own. Within weeks of arriving I was interviewing Austin high schoolers for the study I later presented in London. A year later, my head of school came to watch me pitch on Capital Factory's main stage. Limitless, a YouTube channel made in partnership with Alpha, flew me to Hawaii to pitch Ippo to investors. And Crawft's first beta ran on Macs at Alpha.
Founder of Trilogy, backer of AlphaPersonally funded my full scholarship