Shafik Bara

My coping mechanism for living in war without going insane was creating systems. Systems and algorithms to do things in everyday life without having to think. This developed. And eventually was translated into mathematics and computer science. I got into the national math Olympiad team in 2023, got rank one in the team selection test in 2024, and represented Syria in the International Math Olympiad (IMO) in 2024 and 2025. The results of my years in Olympiad where: Bronze IMO 2025, HM IMO 2024, Bronzes in APMO 2025, 2024. In 2025, I got into the SYE One-Year program with a 7% admission rate, and after a whole bloody cycle of applications, I eventually got into the University of Edinburgh in the UK with a full scholarship from the Global Talent Fund BIG program. My ultimate goal is to build a deeptech startup that will have a huge impact on the whole world, and before that I aim to work in Quantitative finance and VCs for 4-5 years. The way I was obsessed with systems when I was younger is very similar to the kind of systems I'll be building in the future in both finance and tech.