My name is Sofia. I tend to feel a personal responsibility for the human condition, and in this sense I like the following words from Manlio Argueta: "Hope nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope when everything is clear. Awareness."

I am originally from Romania, where I grew up rollerblading and dropped out of high school after freshman year. Through a contorted series of events, without my national diploma, I found myself a Stanford University student in the class of 2024, where the sole comment on my admission file was "she might struggle academically, but this is an interesting person." I graduated with my thesis on the role that emerging technologies can play in destabilizing governments of conflict-affected areas. The title of the school matters less to me than the people I learned with there, who I continue to build with today. To the devastation of my academic advisor, I had a tendency to leave Stanford for entire weeks during every single quarter to Be in The World. There were simply bigger things to do.

To Be in The World during undergrad meant doing disarmament/stabilization/mediation work in war and conflict areas. For entities with varying degrees of power, from value-aligned governments and international agencies to informal victim groups in the very communities I worked in, I led fact-finding on mass atrocities, intelligence collection, assisted with local disarmament procedures. I am experienced in mediation between groups, including victim-perpetrator dynamics.

This I have learned through varying operations in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Rwanda, Ukraine, Peru, Venezuela, where I traveled alone and made many friends. I was inside Tigray/Amhara region after the war ended in 2022. I did my work, but never strayed from the real life that was unfolding and continuing around me in those places: I've stopped to join dance circles on the side of an Axum highway, have done "Young Hearts Break Free" in a village karaoke bar with locals, spent time with everyone, sculptors and grocery store clerks and engineers and public servants in languages from Swahili to Google-Translated-Nepalese, shared a singular chocolate milkshake with two straws, with a gang leader in an informal settlement. I like earnest, unconventional adventures.

I have led some changes to international conflict-related policies, have supervised cash transfers processes for Venezuelan migrants in Peru. At age 19, I was a speechwriter for the Prime Minister of Iceland. After graduation, I was a part of a small Team of Experts that worked on war crime prosecutions with an emphasis on sexual violence, where I investigated the link between trafficking of women online and financing mechanisms of terrorist groups.

Prince William personally handed me an award for the above mentioned work. On stage, shaking his hand in front of press and other royalty from across the globe, I asked him if he liked AC/DC (he had walked up on stage to Thunderstruck). He answered "no." As would be expected, this event did not change whether or not I will be shot at on the field, during my work.

I feel courageous as a sleepwalker who simply goes. If there are things I feel I must know or see, I will spend the next few hours making a plan to be executed the next day. I learn and adapt with adrenaline, without hesitation. I once broke into the house of a quantum physicist because I had questions for him on the matter of transdisciplinarity. If something does not exist, I will make it. Finding myself in Kenya during the emergence of the 2024 Finance Bill protests and subsequent abductions, I picked up my camera, bought several SD cards that I later hid in various parts of my home and clothing, and began to interview the abducted protesters who managed to return home. Two years later, I would make a similar video collection about Libyan militias in the Mediterranean sea, when me and civilian colleagues conducted a search and rescue operation that saved the lives of 73 people, including one baby and over a dozen children.

Today, I am 23 and live nowhere, but soon plan to be in Mali, in part because I love desert blues. I box and can fly a plane, but cannot drive a car. I read a book a day on average and have the greatest family in the world. They read too. Every time I start a new book, I write down on its cover the place and context I am in when I begin it. On "The Years" by Annie Ernaux, read in June 2023, I wrote "I have never been happier than I am today, at 3am, at this cafe in Paris with Carmen [my best friend on all levels of reality]. Life is beautiful. Wait for it."

I speak Romanian, English, Swahili, French, Latin, Russian, in this order of fluency. Write to me in them, say hello.

There's more about me I am forgetting. Identity is not progressive or an isolated system.