I'm 19, a working-class kid from Shanxi province, China. Dropped 11th grade in 2024 after deciding I refused to be optimized into an exam machine. Returned through 单招 (single-recruit) to vocational college in 2025 — a holding pattern, not an identity.

For the past nine months I built and ran a Korean-language financial Twitter operation solo (0 to 4,000 real followers, 60% bookmark rate). I built the entire AI agent stack myself: Claude Code + Cursor orchestration, Apify scrapers, ElevenLabs voice, Gemini Imagen, custom Telegram bot pipelines, full-stack Next.js. In May 2026 I quit after refusing to fabricate earnings screenshots; the operation's playbook reportedly traced back to Burmese pig-butchering SOPs. I have 1,099 Telegram messages preserved as evidence.

I'm using this transition to start a 10-year path to frontier-science PhD (MIT / Stanford / Berkeley / Princeton). Three threads I'm serious about for the next decade: AI alignment (immediate, builds on what I've shipped), longevity biology (Sinclair / SENS), grand-unification physics (Weinstein / Penrose / Wolfram).

Watching Rick and Morty in high school crystallized what kind of scientist I want to be — the discipline of the fictional Rick without the cynicism. That's the bet behind the @becomingrick brand.

Public learning: GitHub becomingrick / Substack becomingrick.substack.com / Twitter @becomingrick.