All throughout my life I've enjoyed math, but I think one of the clicking points for me is when I learned that algebra was created by a Muslim. That was very inspirational and I felt that as a Muslim, it should be my job to continue that down that line and be a good math student.

HoopMath Academy is my nonprofit organization. Its goal is to motivate students to love learning math, like I do. The real thing I want to help with is getting kids to really enjoy this. Anyone can really be forced to sit down and crank out a bunch of math problems. But if they don't enjoy it, then they're never going to want to do it on their own. I focus more on math inspiration, rather than just creating math material.

I remember this one kid from my first ever presentation. I was really nervous — I had no idea if kids would respond well to what I was doing. I was looking for a sign from one of the members of my audience that this really resonated with them. This kid came up to me after the presentation and I still remember what he was wearing: an aqua green shirt and gray sweatpants. In my presentation, I did math magic tricks to show my audience and he was really interested in learning the math behind it. He was asking questions and trying to figure out how he could learn this for himself. That was the point where I realized I actually impacted someone and inspired them to like math more. 

I've been really blessed to have guidance and community support. I attribute a lot of my academic success to that, especially in the math field. So I think I would be ungrateful if I didn't try to do this. My community, my teachers, my parents, they've all done so much for me. And if I have the ability to help another kid who may not have as much guidance, then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t.