Hi, I'm Ridisha Thawrani, and I'm so excited to share an eye-opening experience I had last year through AlgoEd!

In Spring 2025, I competed in the PennSEM Social Entrepreneurship Competition. I had zero experience with presenting, but when I saw the opportunity on my school's website, I thought-why not? It sounded fun and new. I asked one of my friends to team up with me, and we created a presentation together on Canva for the preliminary round.

We honestly didn't expect much, but to our surprise, we were selected as one of the 8 global finalist teams! The final round was a live Zoom presentation, so we edited our slides, wrote a script, practiced a lot-and ended up placing 2nd Runner-Up globally!

It was such a fun and rewarding experience for both of us. So if you're on the fence about joining a competition-do it. You might feel unsure, you might think you won't win, but trust me: you grow, you learn, and you surprise yourself. I went from clueless to a global finalist, and you can too. Don't miss out on something that could change everything.