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How should one spend a life? I've carried this question since high school, trying on different answers like costumes each year on career day. Titles, I later figured, reveal little. Lei noticed last year that what actually moves me is remaining a 'sponge' to the people and practices worth learning from. Alea put another name to this recently, calling it 'discernment' in my willingness to deviate when something stops being worth the cost of staying.
I think if we want downstream impact, says my good friend Lenz, we would need upstream positioning. And while I've gathered enough conviction to know where my own contributions might be taken most seriously, the paths below are still taking shape, explored alongside peers whose questions mirror mine.
Pursuits In Progress
01How Might We Steward Capital for Meaningful Ends?
Capital is not merely a resource as it signals what is valued, who is believed, and which directions are worth investing in.
Grantmaking and ESG operate according to different frameworks, each with distinct constraints and levers. I'm interested in how these might be used carefully and responsibly to mobilize resources for underserved communities and promising solutions.
What this means for me now
I’m currently part of the Climate Change Accelerator at Makesense, mapping sustainability sectors across Southeast Asia and actively preparing for a role before graduation. In parallel, I am determining which CFA credential to pursue.
02 What Actually Drives Growth, and Can We Measure It?
What causes some societies to become prosperous and civilizationally resilient, while others stagnate? Standard narratives feel incomplete, almost tautological. What I want to understand is the causal mechanisms beneath these correlations, and whether the Philippines faces binding constraints that are different from what worked for South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore. How do we even know if interventions are working when economic development operates on longer timelines and involves countless confounding variables?
I argue you can't improve what you can't measure
We lack basic public data on so many dimensions of Philippine society, from granular local government spending to real-time economic indicators that could inform policy. This fundamentally limits our ability to understand what's broken and whether attempted fixes are working. I'm curious about best practices in governance elsewhere, and whether building better measurement systems and data infrastructure could be more leveraged than direct interventions, since you can't improve what you can't measure. But I'm uncertain whether this is a tractable problem for non-governmental actors or whether it requires state capacity we simply don't have yet.
Perhaps not all problems are worth solving?
At the short-term, some interventions might improve metrics slightly, but won't address binding constraints on growth. Others might be incredibly high-leverage but politically impossible or require expertise we don't have. I'm trying to develop better frameworks for problem prioritization . The meta-challenge is that this kind of strategic thinking requires both rigorous research and intimate knowledge of local political economy, and I'm still building both.
03 How Might We Design Institutions That Produce Scientific Breakthroughs?
Despite computers and the Internet, we haven't seen improvements at the scale of 1870-1970's electric grids, modern medicine, or agricultural revolution. It appears that we've come to believe progress "just happens" rather than recognizing it as a deliberate policy choice, the way the Greatest Generation, I read, understood when they poured 1.86% of GDP into R&D and created NASA, DARPA, and the NSF within a single generation.
Why progress stopped being a policy choice
I'm trying to understand what happened between the Endless Frontier era in the US and now, particularly how cultural revolts against technology in the 1960s-70s, combined with the Cold War's end, dismantled the very idea that science deserved prioritization. Recent revival in ARPA-H, Schmidt Futures, and Arc Institute suggests we may be rekindling that agency, and I'm curious whether new institutions found wisdom from history.
What actually accelerates discovery
I'm drawn to metascience's core question on how we might improve the scientific process itself. I've learned that beyond funding, we need further attunement which mechanisms genuinely accelerate breakthroughs versus which are bureaucratic red tape we've mistaken for progress.
04 Where Can I Add Value to Tech Governance from Asia?
While frontier AI safety within Western centers of innovation remains critical, I've been engaged with field-building in my region since 2022, where far less path dependency bring opportunities to improve institutional foresight on risks.
Where my thinking is
On talent development. Insisting people stay in the Philippines might invite stagnation. Progress accelerates when we both funnel the best talents toward opportunities overseas where they build real capacity, as we nurture the epistemic environment here so those who remain develop sharper heuristics to see latent concerns more clearly.
On policy windows. Building trust with public officials has taken us years, and I still weigh whether slow progress reflects necessary relationship-building or fundamental misalignment between how risks are framed and what decision-makers presently conceive as problems.
On regional dynamics. Asian countries outside Sino-US relations face questions whether to align with Western AI safety frameworks, develop indigenous approaches, or broker middle-ground positions. I'm exploring where the Philippines and similar nations can add unique value that neither major power can easily provide.
Projects In Play
01 Unjournal
Exposure as an assistant to professors early in undergrad immersed me in the workings of the academe, revealing its norms and limitations while allowing me to test my fit within it. In 2025, I began to reimagine what research can become beyond the well-behaved paper. I privilege rigor, but would like to transcend the sterility of traditional scholarship, having spent basic education in arts and design.
I have gone through rabbit holes experimenting with form, allowing the work itself to carry its arguments where stories, maps, audio, data, and speculative fragments exist alongside one another as epistemic tools beyond just ornament.
Complementing this, I want to start an independent press where ideas are stirred in conversation ala philosophy salons and carried outward into research and writing. What emerges here reflects on the archipelagos we inhabit and the technologies we reckon with.
Where I am with this
Support through Sigla Research Center's grants and Tandemic's data science accelerator has made this exploration possible this year.
02 A Life Board
Since 2024, I have been thinking about what it means to design a life with others, beyond the rhythms of check-ins and milestones, through sustained, intentional reflection.
I formalized a small circle of people in 2025 whom I could meet with regularly to talk through the big arcs across career shifts, creative risks, emotional weather, and long-term dreams.
These are not just my mentors, but also broader co-conspirators who amplify one another’s ambitions, speak truthfully, and remain curious about the people we are becoming.
What I want this to hold
I want to curate this space with care, where accountability, imagination, and emotional safety are premium. A place to raise the ceiling of self-belief, to be seen clearly, and still encouraged to stretch.
03Gatherings
As I prepare for graduate studies and later pursue an early career in management consultancy and or tech, I keep circling back to a quiet desire to gather people in the in-between.
These are early-career peers who are still figuring out what they care most about, who they might become, and how their work might meet the world's unmet needs.
Since freshman year, I have been hosting informal and intentional spaces(a kind of third space) where we map out our edges and trace contours of T-shaped profiles oriented toward moral ambition and further flourishing.
Not to finalize trajectories, but to sit with them and think in good company about problems that are tractable but overlooked and how we might move toward them with more clarity.
If I were to anchor these conversations in a reading group here in Cebu, is that a space you’d want to step into?